


The Craven Hive

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arthur Conan Doyle Canon References, Asexual Sherlock, Background Femslash, Background Relationships, Background Slash, Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Death, England (Country), Friendship/Love, Hospitals, John is a Very Good Doctor, Literary References & Allusions, London, Moral Dilemmas, Multi, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV John Watson, Platonic Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Post-World War I, Queer Gen, Queerplatonic Relationships, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson Friendship, Sherlock Holmes and Bees, Sherlock Plays the Violin, Smoking, Soldiers, Tea, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2018-11-30 16:38:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 35,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11467494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: In the last days of the First World War, Dr. Watson returns from the service for which he departed in "His Last Bow," and looks for a new kind of work. He joins Dr. Arthur Hurst in his pioneering treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. But their work on the forefront of medical research, locked in battle against the destruction of the war, is disrupted by violent death. In addition to the obvious danger near at hand, there is the risk that this will discredit Hurst’s unusual methods. Dr. Watson does the only thing he can do: he calls in Holmes. The case will require their joint expertise, and all the wisdom of their shared experience.This fic includes lots of emotional conversations, history, architecture, parlor music, and literary allusions. It is appearing in fortnightly installments (every other Sunday), and should be published in its entirety by February 2018.Post-completion note for the curious: this does not explicitly ship Holmes and Watson as sexual partners, but is designed to be shipping- and shipper-friendly.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first Sherlock Holmes fic I've written since my notebook-filling days half a lifetime ago, so of course I've decided to make it a novella-length work in the style of the canon itself. I blush at my own temerity and welcome all feedback. Tags will be updated as the work progresses.
> 
> Author's note 8/12/17: The weekly updates of the summer will be adjusted to fortnightly updates to accommodate the authorial responsibilities of the academic year. If you have questions about history, observations about the same, or potential triggers you'd like me to tag (this is, after all, a casefic set in a hospital for those physically and mentally traumatized by war...) do let me know.

_No one of us who had previous experience of the Ypres Salient fighting could anticipate, without horror and dread, the orders received for the great effort and still greater sacrifices of Passchendaele. The approaches to the front, and beyond, were simply beyond description. Wastes of mud, destroyed houses, roads torn up by constant shelling and, above all, the vile weather conditions that made life a burden. The enemy might brush aside the advance as the taking of a mud patch, but to resist it had at one time or another put nearly a hundred divisions into the arena of blood. — The Battle of Passchendaele, report by General David Watson_

  


It is now more than half a lifetime since I concluded, with the hubris of the young, that I had done forever with war. When I look back at the winter of 1881 at forty years’ distance, I cannot help but be amazed at my own zeal, even in those darkest days, for compiling facts, for creating catalogues which might help me make meaning of the world. But I anticipate myself — or perhaps, with the too-long focus of the aged, I simply wander from my tale. Now that the world has come once more to a fragile peace, and my good friend Sherlock Holmes has devoted himself at last to the cultivation of hives upon the Sussex downs, I deem it possible to write of the strange affair of Seale Hayne, which brought us together again after the great cataclysm of the age. I write not as one rejoicing in hard-won safety, but as one who has finally learned that our search after safety may always be a vain thing. We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end?

As I have written elsewhere, I had rejoined my old service in August of 1914. Even a doctor who has seen his three-score years may be of considerable use, provided his hands are steady. And to my mind, there is more honor in calling up old campaigners like myself than in encouraging untried boys to seek imagined glory, or pursue imagined duty, amidst the unimaginable landscapes of war. From April of 1915 to July of 1918 I was in France; even here, I wish to write of it as little as possible. Let poets do so, or politicians — God knows I am neither. Holmes may have foreseen more of it than I, for all that it was I who had been a soldier. But even he proved himself less than infallible. 

When the 149th, which I had so long known as the “Fighting Fifth,” was reduced to cadre strength, I was sent back to England alongside veterans less than half my age. No two men fight the same war, much less two generations. But I was still sorry, on that Channel crossing, to think of how many illusions had been shattered for these men, how many securities. It was hardly my place to say so in so many words, but I hoped they might come, in time, to rediscover things they now believed irretrievably lost, as I once had. 

Once again I returned to London, the hub of our threatened civilization. I spent as little time as possible in the streets. The city’s mood was sombre; the barrage balloons overhead never allowed us to forget that here, too, the threat of war was present. As for me, and the men under my care, it is perhaps enough if I say that Passchendaele was only a matter of weeks behind us. There was much bitter truth in Haig’s infamous order of that bloody spring: there had been no other course open to us but to fight it out, and we had done so. But as for that other pronouncement — _Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement_ — I sometimes wonder if such grandiloquent statements would survive the viewing of such positions, ill-supplied, desperately defended, and irreverently nicknamed by the British soldier whose sense of humor outlives even his last hope.

The guns echoed long for all of us, and across the Channel, they sounded still. But with a dizzying suddenness, I found myself once again plunged into comparative inaction. After days and weeks blurred with fatigue, where even light and dark had ceased to mark the rhythm of our work, I was released with the nation’s perfunctory thanks. So it was that I found myself one morning at a bookshop, examining with more than common interest a volume entitled Medical Diseases of the War. My curiosity and compassion were excited in roughly equal measure. The book had fallen open to a plate of photographs, startling even to my eye. In one series, a man with twisted limbs and parodic grin moved with the grotesque gait of a marionette. Another stared fixedly ahead, his mouth set in a dreadful, stoic rictus, while a third seemed to gaze inward, as if struck mad by something he had seen. Worst of all was the man convulsed on a hospital bed. In one photograph, he lay inert and limp, one already dead; in another, knees raised, he seemed curiously abandoned, his posture recalling to my mind the crucifixions in the churches of the landscape from which I had just come.

But for all this, it was not the images which held my attention most strongly. The pamphlet’s author was clearly a doctor of no ordinary skill and insight. His prose was lucid, and his solutions impressed me for their common sense as well as for their creativity. More than once, in perusing, for instance, recommendations of rest and bromide for soldiers dismissed as incurably damaged in mind, I was forcibly reminded of my friend Sherlock Holmes. Here, unmistakably, I was in the presence of a passionate mind. Almost in the same breath, he argued for the seriousness of the war’s horrors and for the great hope for cure of those most seriously affected by them.

Only the impatience of the bookseller drove me out into the street, my new purchase clasped firmly under one arm. Arrived at my club, I ordered a plate of sandwiches, and re-immersed myself in the treatise. I read into the evening, invigorated by a sense of relief and recognition. When I had turned the last page, I flipped back to ascertain the identity of the author. I resolved that, no later than the next morning, I would send a telegram to Dr. Arthur Hurst, of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley. With the din of war still loud in my ears, I heard no warning whisper of Fate regarding the strange sequence of events into which this action would draw me.


	2. Chapter 2

__

_That is the land of lost content,_  
   _I see it shining plain,_  
_The happy highways where I went_  
_And cannot come again. —Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896)_

__  
__  


Having arranged for my telegram to be sent, I found myself possessed by a strange spirit of restlessness. I walked briskly as far as the Wellington Arch, and found my mood unimproved; proceeding into Hyde Park, I paused at the bandstand. The uniforms of the musicians made them resemble, to my eyes, so many tin soldiers. They played sentimental favorites — “Roses of Picardy,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” — and I tried to feel consoled by the sight of off-duty nurses holding each other’s hands, of a dark-eyed man in hospital blues with a fair woman’s arm hooked possessively through his. There are times, however, when the solitary man feels himself oppressed by the presence of others, and I departed before an hour was up.

I told myself, as I walked through Marylebone, that I did not know whither I was bound, that I had no particular object in mind — I might stop into Madame Tussaud’s; I might browse the collections of Francis Edwards for an attractively-illustrated history or romance. The further I progressed up Gloucester Street, the more feeble did my pretense become, until at last I stood, as so many had before me, hesitating on the pavement opposite 221B Baker Street. 

When my friend and I had last parted, he had urged me to make use of our old quarters. I had protested: “I’ll be spending little enough time in London, Holmes — in England, perhaps — and I shall not be my own master.”

“It has always been as much yours as mine.” As so often, he had answered my thought rather than my words. I was rendered incapable of speech. “It is no bad thing to have a _pied-à-terre_ ,” continued Holmes lightly, perceiving my emotion. “My half-dozen bolt-holes may be a thing of the past, but I found I did not want to give up Baker Street altogether. Think of the repairs that would have had to be made for any subsequent tenant!” I was able to return his smile. 

“Consider,” said he, “my dear Watson, how much your accounts added to my reputation, and thus to the profit of our enterprise. Let us regard Baker Street as the reward for our efforts in the recovery of the Countess of Morcar’s jewel.”

“And surely its price is beyond rubies,” I rejoined. And then we had shaken hands in the street, and I had watched him walk away up Pall Mall, an erect and solitary figure, stepping between pools of lamplight.

Now I stood before our erstwhile lodgings, and held my breath as I crossed over the street. On ringing the bell, I was admitted by a pert, freckled young woman who introduced herself as Miss Turner, niece to our worthy Mrs. Hudson. I took the key from her, and mounted. As I did so, I superstitiously counted the seventeen steps, as though by doing so I could conjure my friend’s presence.

The key did not hesitate in the well-oiled lock; the door opened as easily as ever it had done. I stood on the threshold, and knew myself entirely alone. The scent of Holmes’ tobacco hung in the air, a ghostly presence. The scarred deal table still stood in the corner; I thought it odd that it had not been removed to Sussex. Perhaps the malodorous experiments were inimical to bees. Gathering my courage, I stepped into the room. In vain I attempted to glean, from the familiar furnishings, some clue as to the flat’s recent occupancy. At last I abandoned my feeble efforts, and seated myself in my armchair. 

It might almost have been some distant afternoon when I sat contentedly or impatiently waiting for Holmes to return from one of his incognito expeditions. I found myself half-straining to hear a footfall on the stair. But the rooms held the strange silence, at once stale and expectant, of places whose owners have been suddenly called away. I sat for some time in a brown study, while the bars of light from underneath the curtains slipped across the faded Turkey carpet. At length, driven to movement by thirst — for I was unwilling to trouble Miss Turner for a cup of tea — I extracted my memorandum book from my pocket, and scribbled a note. _Curse you for the most elusive man in London,_ I wrote, signed it with my initials and the date, and left the paper transfixed to the mantelpiece with the jackknife. 

As I drank my tea in an ABC shop, I reflected with a sense of vague unease on the observations I had made in Baker Street. It seemed to me that there had been something — perhaps not even out of sight — something that should have held present significance for me, but in which I had glimpsed only a reflection of the past.

***

The answer to my telegram did not come the next day, nor the day after that. On the third day, I received a letter. Its Devon postmark left me momentarily at a loss, but upon opening it, I found the following:

_Dr. Watson:_

_I was more than glad to receive your offer of assistance. Your experience in the field, and long experience in assisting those troubled in mind, would be most valuable to us at Seale Hayne. As you will see from the postmark, we are a little remote here; I hope this may not prove an insuperable obstacle to a London man. A farm and workshop are better for this sort of work than any hospital or hydro-spa. You’ll see more when you come — if you do. I’ve convinced the military authorities to let me have my head; not even a bureaucrat can argue with results this decisive. I’d rather have a man of your kidney than a dozen psychoanalysts._

_Regards,  
Hurst_

_P.S. Wire your train and I’ll see you’re met._

I could not help but smile at the peculiar and peremptory missive. Hurst was clearly a man confident in his own powers, and in his ability to convince others to fall in with his plans. Any misgivings I might have entertained about departing to take up a situation of which I was almost completely ignorant were overpowered by my reluctance to remain in London. Past and future pressed too heavily on the city, crushing the present into a small and fearful space. It was with relief that I consulted the Railway Manual, sent the requested wire, and departed, no later than the following morning, for the West Country.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Connoisseurs of London's bookshops know the Edwardian interior of Francis Edwards as the premises of Daunt Books.
> 
> The tea shops managed by the Aerated Bread Company were more affordable than their increasingly popular Lyons counterparts.
> 
> The Railway Guide was the government-issued wartime replacement for Bradshaw. Hurst's tone, which Dr. Watson characterizes as "peculiar and peremptory," is based largely on that of his correspondence on a variety of debates as printed in the British Medical Journal. 
> 
> I leave it to the reader to have the fun of independently identifying the allusions to the canon, but am happy to answer questions concerning them.


	3. Chapter 3

_What well appointed commonwealths! where each_  
_Adds to the stock of happiness for all;_  
_Wisdom’s own forums! where professors teach_  
_Eloquent lessons in their vaulted hall!_  
_\-- The British Bee Journal, No. 211, vol. 14, 1886_

It was almost possible, alighting at Newton Abbot, to believe that there were places in England untouched by the dread hand of war. Over the door of the station was a screen of wrought iron, its hard material shaped into the delicate likeness of twining ivy.

As I emerged into the street, it was obvious by whom I was to be met; a young man reclined on the seat of an old-fashioned dog cart, drawn by a dozing pony. On seeing me, he jumped down a little awkwardly, and made a gesture halfway between a soldier’s salute and a farmer’s. 

“Dr. Watson?”

“The same.”

“Corporal James Carlton.” He was a comely fellow, with a dimpled chin and a thatch of dark, curling hair that I could not imagine tamed by a regulation cut.

“Northumberland Brigade.” I swung my bag onto the cart and climbed up after it.

“Royal Engineers.”

“Ah! the bridges and tunnels men. We couldn’t get anywhere without you.”

“That’s right,” said Corporal Carlton amiably; “blame it all on us.” He clucked to the pony, and guided it with a firm hand past luggage trolleys and milling passengers.

“How long have you worked with animals?” I asked. Holmes, I thought, would have presented the boy with his entire past career.

He grinned, apparently nothing discomfited. “My mum always says I was half-raised by the pit ponies. Horses and tunnels... never known anything else.” A muscle at the corner of his mouth twitched. “I prefer the horses.” There was a story there — even I could perceive as much — but I did not inquire further; I knew too well what horrors such a history might contain.

We did not go through the town, but followed the curve of the station road, and were soon proceeding placidly alongside what my self-appointed guide informed me was a branch of the River Teign.

At the sight of the moors, sublime and ancient, my heart lifted within me. Though I had no reason to associate them with anything but danger, I found myself profoundly stirred by their magnificent indifference to the toils of man. As we drew still nearer to Seale Hayne, we lost sight of their lonely grandeur, surrounded by the more homely glories of the hedgerows, lush with summer. Fading cow parsley grew tangled with traveller’s joy and the dark emerald of elm, enlivened here and there with the faint purple of gorse. 

Seale Hayne itself was a noble prospect. Its elegant symmetry bore the stamp of its naval origins; its expansive quadrangle and crenellated arch nodded to tradition, while its brickwork, numerous windows, and cupola-surmounted clocktower were all unmistakably modern. Carlton brought the pony to a halt before the archway. We both were momentarily at a loss — he anxious to discharge his duties both to the pony and to me — but our uncertainty was quickly resolved.

“Dr. Watson!” The voice was pleasant, feminine, and Antipodean in origin. Dismounting from the cart, I shook hands with the voice’s owner.

“Cushla Strotter.” She was a tall woman with warm eyes, a firm, generous mouth, and slightly unruly dark curls. “Thank you, James.”

“Mrs. Strotter.”

I acknowledged the lad with a salute, and he and the pony proceeded to the stables.

“I don’t imagine Arthur told you I’d be your welcoming committee.”

“No, I confess…” 

“I help some of the men with speech difficulties,” she said. “So if you encounter an English soldier with a bit of a New Zealand accent, you’ll know I’m responsible.”

“Most valuable work,” I said. “But — forgive me — Corporal Carlton didn’t address you as Nurse…”

Her welling laughter overflowed. “I’m not. I’m Arthur’s wife.”

“Oh!” 

“Yes, we’re an unconventional establishment,” she said blithely. “I expect you’d like to have tea before seeing the place.”

I readily assented. Indeed, I had already begun to see Seale Hayne, as the flag walks of the quadrangle were populated with its patients and staff. A little group of half a dozen men made a curious, shambling progress together. One walked with a skip, another as if he were battling a gale, but they seemed cheerful enough. Others enjoyed the summer afternoon accompanied by nurses, or pushed in bath-chairs.

“I’ll leave it to Arthur to show you the hospital itself,” continued Mrs. Strotter, as we entered the building. “You’ll be in the North Block, I expect; that’s where we have the wards. The wings are for those soldiers who have recently arrived, and are in need of particular care.” She slowed her stride in order to muster me gravely. “You are aware, Dr. Watson, that we handle many who have been profoundly affected — profoundly injured, in mind and sometimes in body.”

“Indeed,” I said. “It was my interest in your husband’s methods of treating such cases that led me to write to him.”

She smiled at the tribute. “I don’t doubt your interest — or the value of your experience. But we’re a last resort, here. Many of the men have been suffering from their symptoms for more than a year by the time they reach us. And so…”

“There are the psychological and organic effects of the prolonged illness itself, in addition to the original symptoms.”

“I’m glad you understand. I still find myself shocked sometimes, though I was with Arthur at Netley as well. We had one man come to us — a private, 42 years old — who’d been working up to eighteen hours in the day on the docks. He broke down twice in ’16, but on both occasions returned to work after a short rest. His symptoms, of course, only got worse: he worried about his home, he suffered from headaches… by the winter, he began to fear that he would fall into the water, that he could not control himself.”

“That is surely only natural.”

“You may say so, but when admitted to hospital, he could not even wash his hands, as the sight of the water brought back his fear. He was convinced that he would fall, you see; and yet he was otherwise perfectly normal. It was pitiable, Dr. Watson. Arthur talked to him about it, quite calmly and cheerfully, and he made a good recovery, but…” She shrugged expressively.

I watched her graceful movements as she prepared the tea, and wondered how best to reassure this compassionate and courageous woman. I confess that I struggled against the old man’s inclination to believe himself slighted by the young. “I will not, I hope, be guilty of the folly of believing that I am prepared for anything. Two wars have taught me better. But I am at least prepared to confront my own ignorance.” I smiled reminiscently. “In that, I have much experience.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My description of the grating is based on this image:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Newton_Abbot_station_door_screen.jpg
> 
> On Devon's hedgerows, see: http://devonhedges.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Interactive-Distinctive-Hedge-Map-Devon.pdf
> 
> Cushla Henriette Strotter appears to have been a remarkable woman. She corresponded in her own right with Sir William Osler, and worked alongside her husband at the Netley Military Hospital. Hurst's treatise on war neuroses pays tribute to her patient work with deaf and mute soldiers, especially. She would have been 24 or 25 years old in 1918.
> 
> The anecdote on the overworked private is taken from Hurst's writings.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here and elsewhere in the work, I've attempted to stay true to the vocabulary and attitudes of the period towards neurological and physical conditions and their treatment. Hurst had an awareness of situational disability that would not be out of place in medical circles today. But he was also perfectly willing to deceive patients for their own good as he saw it. The term _hysteria_ was used without pejorative connotations, nor explicitly gendered ones, and electric shock was accepted as a treatment... though Hurst was among those who came to decry it. I've taken the artistic license of allowing Dr. Watson to influence that decision.

_These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,_  
    _Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth._  
_— Rupert Brooke, 1914, “The Dead”_

While a detailed account of my engagement at Seale Hayne would, no doubt, be of interest to my fellow members of the medical profession, and have no small claim on the sympathies of the British public, the work undertaken there has been amply chronicled for both audiences elsewhere. I shall here attempt only to convey something of the atmosphere of the place, and of the personalities who were to become entangled in the tragedy that there unfolded.

When I met Hurst himself, that first afternoon, I found myself not only impressed by the magnetism of his personality, but unexpectedly attracted by it. Physically, he was anything but imposing, being slight of build, and naturally stooping. All the keenness of his nature, however, shone forth from sunken and piercing eyes. 

“Zelanda’s given you your tea, I see,” was his unconventional greeting. He drank his own cup standing at the sideboard, and then bustled me off “to see the place.” This meant, first, the wards, and I confess that I consciously steeled myself to see, in the flesh, the damage that Hurst had set himself to repair.

“Many different gaits are caused by hysteria,” began Hurst, without preamble. Through the leaded panes of a half glass door, we watched a too-thin, swaybacked man moving in a parody of a ballet dancer’s _chassé_. I started when he fell to the floor, with a suddenness that made the movement seem almost intentional. “Only a minority,” said Hurst, “have an organic basis.” A high-boned, square-shouldered man stepped quickly over to the sufferer, and crouched beside him.

“Rupert Reynell,” said Hurst, nodding towards the doctor. “Army medico. Our surgeon. Australian. Good man.” By the time we had finished the tour of the place, I felt that I was beginning to be accustomed to Hurst’s eloquence on professional subjects, and its curious contrast to his almost telegraphic brevity when discussing other matters. As we smoked in the archway, I contemplated the flag walks, where the straggling processions still continued, with patients and nurses paired, or men moving in triumphant solitude, with steps that plunged or skipped or shuffled.

“Join me?” said Hurst, breaking in on my reverie. 

“I beg your pardon?”

“New patients all the time,” said he briskly, throwing away his cigarette. “And new work to do… if you’re ready, Dr. Watson.” 

“It will be my honor,” said I, feeling the need of formality to assert myself against this formidable personality.

That first day, I felt myself to be primarily an observer — if I was an actor, I was one blundering without his cues. Hurst was all frankness and confidence, moving to shake each man’s hand, taking name and rank, according to each his military dignities. “Beer!” he cried with delight, encountering our first patient. “Private Beer, as a doctor whose name was for many years pronounced _Hurts_ , I offer my sympathies.” He was rewarded with a smile, though the man’s eyes remained anxious.

“You will allow Dr. Watson to examine you?” The boy only nodded.

“Northumberland Fusiliers,” I introduced myself as I knelt at his feet. I found his muscles to be neither atrophied nor knotted. I looked up at Hurst, and he nodded to me. “Walk to the desk, Private,” I directed. Beer did so with a gait that was stiff, stilted, like the motion of a badly-oiled machine. “And back,” I said, keeping my voice authoritative and impersonal. “Good man.” He almost collapsed into the chair.

“Good!” cried Hurst, echoing me. “Already, you see, there is some improvement with Dr. Watson’s handling!” I could not restrain a startled glance at Hurst; I had done no more than examine the lad. I returned to massaging his calves, as though to make good the expert’s claim in retrospect. And so we continued for half an hour or more. As we fell into a rhythm, Hurst began also to gather from Beer — as if incidentally — pieces of his story, of the weary marches, of the panicked flights, of the fear. 

“Now,” said Hurst at last, and his tone and his touch, on Beer’s shoulder, were both unexpectedly kindly, “you should be able to walk quite normally and without pain.” The private looked up at him; in his eyes there was some anxiety, but also a wild hope. 

“There is no physical damage,” I said quietly. “Perhaps some strain, from having gone halting so long, but that should soon pass.” Beer nodded in acknowledgment, wide-eyed, and then, slowly, rose to his feet. I held my breath. Albeit with some hesitation, the man stood straight. And then the truly extraordinary thing happened. As if from sheer joy, he began first to hop on one leg, then on the other; then to run. Hurst laughed — a strange sound in that small room.

“Perhaps best not to vault the desk just yet,” said he, as Beer’s laps of the room grew increasingly rapid. Obediently, the lad slowed, and saluted us both.

“We’ll give you a bed for the night if you need one,” said Hurst, filling out his chit, “but you can report to your examining board as soon as you like. “I’ve recommended a fortnight’s rest.”

This was but one of our wonders. Hurst was everywhere authoritative and flamboyant, a prophet of his own success. While temperamentally more cautious, I could not but admire his results, not only in the men’s improvement but in the trust they placed in him — no small thing in men for whom obedience had so long meant the subjection to horror. The first of my own successes, some weeks into my residence, was more modest. The case of a nervous monoplegic had stymied the best efforts of the staff, and Hurst drew me into conference with himself and the surgeon. Though superficially undamaged, Corporal Ashby dragged the leg behind him, unable to move it without spasming, indeed scarcely able to move it at all. 

“Faradism,” suggested Reynell, his Australian vowels making the word more portentous. “I can’t do surgery in good conscience — and we can’t tell him I did,” he added, preempting one of Hurst’s favored strategems.

“He’s right,” said I. “Ashby may be the victim of his own nerves, but he’s no man’s dupe.”

“We could tell him,” said Hurst, “that faradism is our last resort before surgery.”

Reynell smiled at me, inviting conspiracy. “Hurst’s irritated because saying ‘Take up your bed and walk’ hasn’t worked in this case.”

“But is faradism necessary?” I asked.

Hurst looked at me sharply. “You are skeptical, Doctor?”

“I confess that I am,” said I, with more firmness than I felt. “It’s not merely that Ashby is a nervous subject, but that he fears pain. Electric shock might bring about an adverse hysterical reaction.”

Hurst’s throwing away his cigarette signaled the first stage of my victory. “What would you advise, then?”

“I would like to try a muscular reeducation,” I said slowly. “Having a new doctor might prove of psychological benefit… and having no other cases myself, I could devote considerable time to him.”

Hurst threw up his hands in theatrical resignation. “Go to it, then.”

If I felt myself already to be, in some sense, Ashby’s partisan, I think it must have been because of his shame. “It’s absurd,” he would say, as he limped painfully along the path, or stood shaking and powerless. “It’s ridiculous.” And all our reassurances were in vain. So on the first morning I went to him, the object of my campaign was a simple one: to give him nothing to be ashamed of. 

“Morning, Ashby,” I greeted him; “don’t get up. Today you can do your work lying abed.”

He smiled ruefully. “Given up on the walking bit, have we?”

“Quite the reverse,” I declared. “But today, I want you only to move without pain.” He shuddered, and tried to repress the shudder. Pretending not to observe this, I worked his leg as I might have worked the leg of a fellow athlete in my rugby-playing days, smoothly and thoroughly.

“It’s an awful cheek of me,” said Ashby softly, after some minutes of this, “but… the stories in _The Strand_ …” He stopped, blushing at his own temerity.

“We can work and talk at the same time,” I encouraged him. “And yes, it is I who wrote them.” I expected him to ask if they were true.

“Would — would you tell me about them? About the writing itself, I mean?” I was so startled by the unprecedented question that I paused in my work.

“It’s just,” said Ashby, blushing still more, “that I thought I might try my hand at writing. After the war.”

That was the moment I counted as my first success — when this shy and shamed and shaking man dared to envision his world after the war. With his leg, too, we made progress. Firmly and deliberately I showed him how to bend the leg and extend it again; how to rotate it from the knee and from the hip. After demonstration, he himself was able to do it, with every appearance of the greatest satisfaction. He gazed at the movements of his own leg with the innocent fascination of a child.

With such successes as these to light them, those early days at Seale Hayne seemed golden to me. The men were cheerful. Reynell’s sister, I discovered, had started a pottery studio, where men steadied their hands on smooth clay, shaping it into beauty. Looking at the drying vases and the men’s shy smiles, it was strange to think that the destructive mud of France was made of the same stuff. Carlton took great delight in personally introducing me to the cows of the estate. He and some others worked alongside the stout and hearty women of the Land Army, ploughing the fields, filling the air with laughter. Private Meek — a lean Cockney, with a cheerful, clever, lop-sided face — superintended basket-weaving. I confess I was surprised by the apparent incongruity of the task; but here, too, shaking hands and shaken nerves were steadied by the repetitive tasks, the careful work of turning bundled reeds into baskets. “We sell them in the town,” Meek informed me proudly. “It was my trade, before the war.” Waking each morning to birdsong was a miracle in itself.

Were I to select one image to stand for the whole of those halcyon days, it would be that of our blackberry-picking, in the still-warm days of early autumn. It was organized as a raid, with much laughter, and mock argument over the provisioning by Carlton, the self-appointed quartermaster. Meek’s baskets were requisitioned, and he treated us all to superbly performed indignation, as only a Londoner could. Even Ashby, with his cane, was carefree. A Lieutenant Merrison, with a natural gift of command, exhorted and directed and praised the harvest. Their purple-stained mouths were sweet with laughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zelanda was an affectionate nickname for Cushla Strotter, used in private correspondence.
> 
> Hurst's family name was, in fact, Hertz; he changed it by deed poll in 1916, as a result of anti-German feeling in Britain. His family background was German-Jewish; his relatives had been in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century.
> 
> The handsome surgeon, Walter Rupert Reynell, is pictured here:  http://www.onkaparingacity.com/libraries/localstudies/view_details.asp?RefID=3740 His sister, Gladys, who taught pottery at Seale Hayne, became a noted artist.
> 
> Private Meek was in fact a real person; his rehabilitation for his trade, enabling him to earn his living, was one of Seale Hayne's early success stories.
> 
> A "blackberry raid" similar to that described by Dr. Watson is depicted here, though with anonymous soldiers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsBgRC76ydM


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peace comes to England, and sudden death comes to Seale Hayne.

_Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;_  
_And beauty came like the setting sun:_  
_My heart was shaken with tears; and horror_  
_Drifted away ... O, but Everyone_  
_Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done._  
_— Siegfried Sassoon, “Everyone Sang,” 1919_

The war did not seem likely to end, that autumn of 1918. On the contrary — it seemed that it could sustain itself indefinitely, insatiate and self-nourishing. Having persisted for so long beyond reason, it persisted still, thriving on destruction, deforming and devouring lands and men. Reading the newspapers, I often heard Holmes’ drawl in memory: _It does seem a most preposterous way of settling a dispute_. Even our cynicism of those days seemed like innocence, looking back at it from the vantage point of a world at war.

Still we persisted. The harvest was brought in. We sent men back to their families, and we sent men back to war. The rains of winter swept in from the North Sea. In the evenings, the staff gathered in a parlor. We had our reading; the room had a Victrola and a piano. The latter was expertly played by a boy named Ronnie Turner, whose upper lip, even after surgeries, was permanently drawn up. It was a small group of men who would willingly join us: Turner and Carlton, Ashby and Merrison, and Victor Rattisbon, who was missing an eye. We were together on the evening of the Armistice.

For us, the news had not come at the eleventh hour, suddenly and joyously with the pealing of bells. No, for us it had come over lunch. We descended from our work to find Gladys Reynell and her friend Margaret, clasping each other’s hands, waiting with shining eyes to share the news. 

Some of the men, of course, got drunk on the strength of it. Many were too ill to be told. And — I must admit it — I was not immune from the feeling that it could not be quite real, this suddenly-declared end to a conflict that, for so many of our men, still raged, not only in nightmare. We did not speak to each other, that evening. Hurst stared into the middle distance, holding his wife’s hand. Merrison and Reynell played a desultory game of chess. We sat with unlit pipes, unread books, untouched letters.

“Thank God,” said Ashby suddenly, into our dazed silence. Turner, that evening, was shaking too badly to play. “Thank God, it’s over.” His speech worked like the magic words in a fairy tale, breaking the spell of silence that had bound us. Carlton, who had a remarkably beautiful voice, began to sing:

“Private Perks is a funny little codger with a smile, a funny smile! Five feet none, he’s an artful little dodger with a smile…” Ashby joined him first, a little hesitantly, and then Rupert Reynell. By the chorus, we were all singing, all — or so I imagined — unspeakably glad.

***

The following morning, our world was still shrouded in fog, curiously silent, as if still stunned. And then came the second shock. It was Turner who told me; I should rather say that it was Turner who brought the news. He loomed up suddenly at my elbow as I was crossing the quadrangle, and began to pluck at my sleeve. The boy was almost gibbering, inarticulate. Even then, I may say I felt no presentiment of disaster. Turner had been bereft of speech when he had come to us; he had been obviously distressed the night before, and a little thing might have overset him.

Perhaps I only sought to deceive myself, or to postpone the certain knowledge that even this place was not secure from violence. At first I sought to soothe Turner, to coax from him the confession of what had upset him, to give him the assurance that nothing could be the adequate cause of his anxiety. My efforts were vain. Though apparently incapable of speaking intelligibly, he was insistent, and he drew me after him. 

The huddled shape on the paving stones was susceptible to only one interpretation. Even the first glance was enough to tell me that here was no sudden swoon. And yet I ran. I could not drop to my knees — my joints protested, even at my slower lowering of myself beside the body. Under such circumstances, the checking of the pulse at the throat seems only the prelude to ritually closing the eyes. And still I did so, to feel the skin cold and clammy under my fingertips. Only then did I allow myself to look at the face. It was Ashby. I knew not what ruin the flagstones would have made of the other half of his face — or rather, I knew it all too well — but in profile, he was recognizable enough, though wearing the anonymous, startled expression of the dead.

My first act was to see Turner settled, with Mrs. Strotter making him a cup of tea. My second was to inform Hurst. My third was to ring for the police. Hurst was at my elbow the while, pacing, the end of his cigarette tracing patterns in the foggy air as he disputed in a hissing whisper the necessity of such a step. I began to regret not presenting him with a _fait accompli._

“It is essential,” I hissed back at him, my hand over the receiver as I waited for the connection. “It is essential for it to be documented as an accident, not merely treated as such. If you refuse to think of your own reputation, think of the well-being of the men — yes, hello, Seale Hayne, Dr. Watson speaking.”

“Dr. John H. Watson, I presume.” The rejoinder came with a hearty laugh. I suspected that the constable on the other end of the line had not been abed, and that his night had been a riotous one.

“The same,” I replied coldly. “There’s been an accident; we have an ambulance, of course, but we’ll need one of your men. The coroner must be notified. Do you have all that?”

There was silence before the man muttered, gravely enough, that all arrangements would be made. I replaced the receiver, leaving him to find whatever aid and whatever sobriety he might.

“There’ll be a most dreadful fuss,” said Hurst, raising his voice now that the police was not a third presence in the room. “There will be a dreadful disturbance to the men — to routine — ”

“There’ll be a worse fuss and worse disturbance otherwise,” I replied. I was sure of my ground here, and not to be shaken. As far as the workings of the law were concerned, I was to be proved right; and yet in a manner that I did not foresee.

***

I have no desire to linger over those dark days. The horror of death struck us all, I think, the more forcibly for its singularity in this place designed as a refuge from the destruction of war. We let the newspapers go for kindling unread, their triumphant headlines making a mockery of our own bewildered grief. The routines of the hospital and its patients were — as Hurst had foretold — disrupted by the fact of Ashby’s death, and by its having come in such a manner, and at such a time. The stock of barbiturates was severely depleted, not only because of the patients’ needs. Even with such aids, I knew too many sleepless hours, and neither I nor any other of the medical officers could afford the dull and sluggish reactions of the insomniac.

It was by my own choice that I attended the inquest, and by necessity that I was the only member of staff to do so. Carlton, having driven me into Newton Abbot, also remained; I was glad, I confess, of his human warmth in the cold village hall, and of the simple reassurance of his resilient youth. It was a grim affair altogether. The faces of all in attendance seemed pallid, almost lifeless themselves, and listless indeed were the proceedings. What I had feared was public indignation, an outcry that presupposed negligence at Seale Hayne as the only possible cause of such a death. What I saw dismayed me more. Neither formal nor informal, neither contemptuous nor sentimental, the coroner’s inquest treated the death of Stephen Ashby, not precisely as a matter of indifference, but as an entirely negligible tragedy. I had imagined Ashby’s relatives — a pale man in an old-fashioned collar, a widow weeping into a handkerchief, a girl trembling with rage and grief — but of these, it seemed, he had none. Later, an uncle in York, notified via telegram, replied to Seale Hayne by letter to say that he would pay for the headstone.

“Death by misadventure” was intoned as poor Ashby’s epitaph, and Carlton and I left the hall in silence. In silence we rode back to the hospital.

“It’s a shame,” said Carlton, pulling up the pony in the same spot where we had halted months ago, on my first arrival. “It’s a shame, so it is.”

“You’re quite right,” I said with a sigh, as I dismounted from the cart. “It is a shame. And a damned waste.”

He looked at me sharply; I suppose that I had never before sworn in his presence. I repressed any tendency to apologize or to explain, and proceeded into the hospital. I ignored — most churlishly, I am afraid — a solicitous inquiry by Margaret McPherson, and proceeded to my own room.

I sat for a long time without putting pen to paper. In all the months since I had come to Seale Hayne, I had not heard from Holmes. I consoled myself with the thought that the wartime mails were less than reliable, and that once I myself had relocated to Devon, a letter from him might have fruitlessly followed me for some time. And yet, I cannot pretend that I had not been wounded by my friend’s silence.

At length, as I had done so many times before for the sake of Sherlock Holmes, I swallowed my pride. Still, I crossed out innumerable fragments — “grotesque tragedy” “unique problem” “affair of more than ordinary interest” — until, petulantly, I threw a sheet of valuable notepaper covered with infelicitous phrases into the grate. Holmes had renounced activity in the world, and the mere existence of insoluble problems was unlikely to prove an incentive. Besides, I jibbed at the idea of reducing Ashby to a conundrum. For one giddy moment I imagined sending a simple and preemptory telegram, using one of Holmes’ own preferred formulae: “Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.”

 _My dear Holmes,_ (I began)

 _I write to you with an appeal which I hope you may answer for the sake of friendship, if not for the sake of professional interest…_

Darkness had fallen over Seale Hayne before I had finished my missive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dark mood and bad weather of the autumn of 1918 are both matters of recorded fact. I skate lightly over the legal formalities by design, I confess, but my research suggests that, because of the circumstances and timing of the death, the military authorities would not have been involved. If I've made a howling blunder over this, please do correct me.
> 
> The song that the company sings on the evening of the Armistice is this favorite of the ranks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXcs1Vv3YlE.


	6. Chapter 6

_“A great many bee-keepers all over the country, when first they discover foul brood in their apiaries, hold up their hands in horror because of the dread disease which makes such havoc.” — Harry W. Craven, Gleanings in Bee Culture, 1905_

The room where we were wont to take our tea was small enough that it smelled of its walnut panelling. In the early autumn, it had been warmed with sunshine and our hope. But now, closed in by fogs, filled with our silences, it was oppressively close.

The telegram arrived one afternoon as we were handing in our cups to Mrs. Strotter for the second time. One of the other medical officers handed it to me with a tremulous murmur and shaking hands. It would be many months — for some, it would be years — before a telegram could again be treated as a harmless thing, rather than a harbinger of disaster. 

I did not recognize the postmark; I only uttered a silent prayer that it did not come from Percy Phelps and his Annie, who had lost too much already. For some moments, I must have stared at the opened missive in my hand. 

“Bad news, Dr. Watson?” Gladys Reynell had ever a kind heart.

“No, no.” I squared my shoulders. “Hurst,” I said, “I have a confession to make to you. It seemed to me that this state of affairs could not stand; that we could not well work with uncertainty hanging over our heads, with a shared grief and a shared enigma shadowing us.”

Hurst’s smile was humorless. “Well?”

I took a deep breath. “I have taken the liberty,” said I, “of requesting the aid of my friend Sherlock Holmes.”

Reynell dropped a fork.

“Rupert,” said Gladys softly. He did not answer, but put his head in his hands.

“But he does not—” began Cushla Strotter, and stopped. “Does he? Would he?”

“He has acted,” said I, “more promptly and more decisively than I had imagined possible. He will be here on the 10.05 tomorrow, and I must meet him.”

There was a stirring around the table. I found that they did not meet each other’s eyes, and felt my resolve strengthened. I could not but believe but any interference would be better than this slow festering of fear. Still, I knew that I was more likely to carry the day with courtesy than with presumption.

“Hurst,” said I, “there are rooms in Newton Abbot where I can have him put up; I can ask him to depart again in the morning.” I silently reflected that any attempt of mine to turn Holmes from the riddle of this tragedy would be as fruitless as an attempt to rein in a bloodhound on a scent; but with any luck, Hurst would not know this.

Hurst finished lighting a cigarette before he spoke. “So,” said he coldly, “we are to suffer disturbance once again for the sake of your conscience.” 

I straightened. “You are the community’s acknowledged head; if you believe I have acted wrongly, I cannot but accept your reproach.”

Hurst waved the cigarette between nervous fingers. “Don’t stand on your dignity, man.” Sparks flew to the carpet; Mrs. Strotter’s gaze followed them. “Your… _expertise_ \-- ” there was an ironical emphasis to the word -- “must be acknowledged superior in such matters.”

“I am sure,” said Cushla Strotter firmly, “that Dr. Watson has acted with the best interests of the hospital at heart.” She reached my teacup to me with a hand that did not tremble.

“And of the patients,” added Margaret McPherson, an unexpected ally. 

“We must hope,” said Reynell, and his voice was taut, “that the event confirms your judgment.”

“Indeed.” The tea was half-stewed, but I was glad of it. “I trust it shall.”

***

The next morning, Carlton drove me to the station, at his insistence. We were bundled against the cold, but the drive still seemed to me a cheerless one enough, as we rattled in silence down the pale lanes. The pony was a hardy native of the moors, and thus more inured to the weather than her passengers. Nonetheless, I was glad of Carlton’s experience, and the strength of his hands on the reins, and told him so. We exchanged few other words. I refrained from asking his opinion on Holmes’ advent — I knew the gossip of Seale Hayne too well to suppose that it could have remained a secret — or from insisting that I had brought it about in hopes of adequately acknowledging, at least, the tragedy that Ashby’s death had been.

The woman who served as the station guard allowed me onto the platform. My age and apparel, no doubt, proclaimed that I was no restless fugitive from the hospital’s discipline, no would-be evader of the wartime fares. As I waited for the steam of the train to appear against the November clouds, I paced, and I must confess that I paced nervously. The only other occupant of the platform was a turbaned Sikh, whom I might have expected to pace to keep off the cold, or to seek shelter within, but he watched me imperturbably. I hardly know what I allowed myself to fear — that Holmes would have changed too much, in the years of our separation, or too little; that I would be unable to hold back the instinctive outpourings of my soul, or that I would find only platitudes to utter. The punctual arrival of the train did nothing to dispel my anxiety.

My pen falls short of describing the relief I felt at seeing, at last, my old friend descend from the train. It seemed to me that he must have drawn every eye, his energy palpable and undimmed. He moved a little stiffly, it is true, but he came towards me with swift step and outstretched hand.

“My dear Watson!”

“Holmes!” I wrung him warmly by the hand, and I confess that my own sight was dimmed for an instant, as I beheld those grey eyes smiling into mine.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Watson,” he declared, echoing my thought. 

I swallowed hard. “I’m so glad you’ve come,” said I; “I have been in great perplexity of mind.”

“Hum! You shall tell me about it in due course, but first, Watson, tell me how you come to be here. Your note informing me of your presence in London and your letter concerning this dark affair reached me in quick succession.”

“It is soon told,” said I, lifting Holmes’ grip into the cart and climbing up after him. “In London, I came across a book by this man Hurst — the doctor overseeing the hospital at Seale Hayne. I wrote to him to express my admiration, and discovered he’d badgered the authorities into giving him this place to continue his work on war neuroses. I’m one of ten medical officers on staff.”

“Your penchant for racy and elliptical narrative has not deserted you,” was Holmes’ comment. “And you have been here since—?”

“July.”

“And you noticed nothing out of the ordinary — however trivial in appearance — before this dreadful incident?”

I glanced meaningfully at Carlton’s back. “I shall endeavor to cast my mind back, Holmes.”

“Capital,” said he. “Are the moors easily accessible from Seale Hayne?”

“A brief walk only will bring you to them.”

“Then come with me there, if you would, Watson, when we have returned. I want to stretch my legs after my journey.”

The ruse seemed to me transparent enough, but Carlton left us unquestioningly in the yard.

As we walked, I could not refrain from mustering my friend’s countenance, as if to reassure myself of his presence. He was, it seemed to me, paler and thinner than his wont, but such could be said of us all after four years of war. Moreover, despite his pallor, he had clearly spent some time in the sun.

“The Sussex air must agree with you,” I ventured.

“Hm?”

“You never took that sun in London.”

Holmes regarded me a moment in silence; then he threw back his head and laughed. “Excellent, Watson! I have missed the bracing effect of your ratiocination. So, now that we are out of earshot of that comely corporal, tell me: what have you observed? What are your impressions? Your letter said that you were dissatisfied with the verdict, but you are more than dissatisfied; you are disturbed. Tell me why.”

It was, in some ways, a relief to be again so transparent to another human being. “ _Nothing is ever settled_ ,” I quoted, “ _until it is settled right._ That death should come here, sudden and unexplained, seems to me like a violation of the sacred. That Ashby should die here, after so much — ! I believe it is felt as an affront to all, and perhaps as a risk. 

“What I did not tell you earlier, Holmes — what I feared to entrust to a letter — is that your powers here may be thwarted.”

He looked at me sharply; he was still, then, accessible upon the side of vanity. 

“What I mean to say is: these men do not behave rationally. They do not think rationally. They cannot. So your laws of probability — any attempt to reason out a likely course of action — must fail.”

“Or be recalculated using new variables,” he retorted. “Do not yet despair. And?”

I sighed. “And,” I said, “I cannot help but feel that my professional honor has been wounded. ‘Death by misadventure.’ How could misadventure come to a man under treatment? Only as a result of his doctors’ negligence, or improvidence, or error.”

“You overstate the case,” said Holmes, not ungently.

“Perhaps.”

“And suicide?” asked Holmes, very softly. “Is it possible?”

“Of course it is possible,” I said, “but — ”

“But?”

“It seems so unlikely. He was thriving, as have others with the same malady. I have seen grown men running and skipping like children, for the sheer pleasure of movement. I — I suppose I do not want to believe it,” I concluded unhappily. “I took responsibility for that boy’s treatment, and I am loath to believe that we overlooked so patent a danger.” We paused a few moments in silence, surveying the broad expanse of moorland. “He wanted to be a writer.”

I was prepared for a brisk upbraiding from Holmes for my sentimentality, but he laid a kindly hand on my shoulder. “Well, friend Watson,” said he, “we shall see what a trained observer can do to clarify the business. I should be glad to set your mind at ease, if I can.”


	7. Chapter 7

_In spite of the clouds of bees and an odd sting or two, I examined the frames._  
_— The Bee-Keepers’ Record, September 1907_

Together Holmes and I descended from the moors. We walked in silence; I found myself obscurely comforted, if more by Holmes’ presence than by his promises. By the time we had washed, and Holmes had put on a clean collar and cuffs, it was high time we were at luncheon.

I looked forward to this first encounter between Holmes and the staff of Seale Hayne with some trepidation. I knew well Holmes’ capacity for impishness, his impatience with any seeking to preserve their own reputation at the expense of the smooth progress of his inquiries. In Arthur Hurst he would confront a nature as proud, a spirit as masterful as his own, and of this meeting, which I had done so much to bring about, I could not foresee the consequences. 

Holmes was disarmingly bland as I performed introductions; I need hardly add that I mistrusted this façade instinctively. 

“Miss McPherson,” he murmured, “Miss Reynell; you must have the good Dr. Watson tell you of the time I asked him to master the history of Chinese pottery in a day, and take — alone and unaided — a priceless Tang bowl into the lair of one of Europe’s most dangerous men.”

I felt myself blushing. “That is not,” I protested to Margaret and Gladys in an undertone, “a wholly accurate statement.”

“Watson will tell you,” said he easily to Reynell, “that my knowledge of anatomy is unsystematic at best; but I hope you may be prevailed upon to enlighten an amateur on some details of your very interesting work with ambulatory disorders.” 

By the time the formalities were completed, they were all, if not won over, at least won away from their own preconceptions. All, that is, except Hurst. Whether his tardiness was studied, on this day, or merely the result of his not-uncommon preoccupation with his work, I could not say. Mrs. Strotter, to do her credit, exhibited no signs of unease or embarrassment. He slipped in just as the soup was being served, with perfunctory apologies to all. His greeting to Holmes, while brusque, remained just short of outright incivility. 

Having thus established his prerogative to independent action, Hurst settled into the general conversation politely enough. At Holmes’ urging, I did retell the story of the Tang bowl, which elicited a pleasant exchange on traditions of pottery on three separate continents. It was at the end of the meal that Holmes played his trump card, and played it masterfully. Taking advantage of the lull as the coffee cups were handed round, he spoke.

“My friend Dr. Watson,” said Holmes, his voice carrying down the table, “has told me much of his admiration for your work, Dr. Hurst. As one who has long studied the human mind, I have naturally listened to his accounts with the greatest interest.”

I bowed my head over the brew that attempted to turn hedge-plants into something like coffee (a desperate experiment, and not a very successful one) in order to hide my surprise at this somewhat liberal interpretation of our exchanges.

I saw Hurst swallow; he took a pull on his cigarette before responding. “You are too generous, Mr. Holmes. I must suspect flattery from a man so little likely to be overawed by specialization.”

“Not the least in the world,” said Holmes, with an appearance of ingenuousness that might well have taken in an observer unacquainted with the man. “Say rather that I recognize — and pay tribute to — the work of a man who has created his own specialty.”

Inwardly I cheered. To judge by Margaret McPherson’s dimple, she was experiencing similar amusement. If Hurst were to respond other than churlishly, it would mean an implicit acknowledgement of Holmes’ expertise, as well as his own. And Holmes had offered him only courtesy. 

“Well,” said Hurst, a little heavily, as he reached to take his coffee cup from his wife, “I suppose that I must be gratified, Mr. Holmes. Watson will have explained to you how delicate is the work that we do here.”

“Indeed,” assented Holmes readily, “and I would not dream of disturbing you in it unless the most acute necessity demands it. I would, however, beg the favor of having Dr. Watson accompany me as I familiarize myself with the place. His knowledge of these men and their disorders will be invaluable where my expertise ends.”

Thus Holmes carried his point, and for the remainder of the afternoon, he roamed the grounds. I followed in his wake as, fortunately, Hurst was very ready to grant that this was not a dereliction of my duties as medical officer, but rather a continuation of them. After luncheon, we accompanied Misses Reynell and McPherson to the pottery studio, where Holmes loped around getting clay on his tweeds, fiddling with half-fired jugs, being introduced to the men, and making a nuisance of himself generally until Gladys Reynell, laughing, threatened to make him take a turn at the wheel if he stayed.

“You’ve got potter’s hands, too, Mr. Holmes,” said she; “don’t think I wouldn’t.”

He held up those hands in mock surrender. “I yield. Come, Watson!”

Next we visited the apiaries, the especial charge of Ronnie Turner. He was nervous and withdrawn, but Holmes filled his silence with a flow of commentary. In this somewhat one-sided discussion of frames and broods and swarms I was lost. Reassured that Holmes was managing to put Turner at his ease, I concentrated on filling and smoking a pipe until my companion was ready to proceed.

“He’s not been the same since Ashby’s death,” said I quietly, when we were out of earshot. “He was agitated on Armistice Day, and then this…”

“Mm,” said Holmes, one of his meditative noises that seemed to suggest I had missed something.

“I have worked with the boy here for months, Holmes.”

“Yes,” said my friend thoughtfully, “just so. You have worked with him here for months.” He spoke slowly, musingly, and lapsed into silence thereafter. Slightly piqued, I made no effort to continue conversation until we reached the basket-weaving. Meek sat alone with the materials of his trade, the labor of the others having been requisitioned for the last days of the harvest.

“Private Meek,” I said, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes. You needn’t get up — why, Meek, whatever is the matter?”

The man had leapt to his feet as though galvanized, and had fixed my friend with a wild-eyed stare. He was practically jumping with nervous excitement; it was the worst I had ever seen his symptoms. 

“There is nothing to alarm you, man,” said I, clearly and deliberately. “This is my friend — ” I laid a hand on Holmes’ arm for emphasis — “Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I am making him acquainted with the place. We haven’t come to inspect you.” I added this on a would-be jocular note, but in truth my heart was moved with pity, seeing Meek’s hands extended towards Holmes as if in supplication.

“There’s no chance… There’s no chance…” He was shifting from one foot to the other. I watched the working of his mouth, and cast a warning glance at Holmes. By the slightest of signs he acknowledged it. 

“There’s no chance…” said Private Meek for the third time.

“Meek,” I began again; and in the same moment one of the thin, wiry hands shot out to grasp at Holmes’ sleeve.

“It couldn’t,” he choked out, and he grabbed up one of his own reeds from the table, twisting it in both hands so that it it bit into the flesh, his arms extended.

“No no,” said Holmes softly, and with equal gentleness he reached to take the reed from the private’s tense hands. “My friend Watson here has told me of his own observations. I trust them as I trust him — implicitly.” I smiled in what I hoped was an encouraging manner, although, as so often, Holmes’ chain of reasoning was one I could not follow. 

“Your comrade was not strangled,” said Holmes. “And look — ” he laid the reed over his own hands, with their long fingers, their musician’s calluses. “This could not cause a lethal wound. It would bend aside; the edge would turn. It’s a beautiful thing. And it will bloom!” He did not touch Meek, but invited him with look and gesture to join him in contemplation of the unfinished baskets on the table. Laying the reed back among its fellows, he ran his fingers over the half-woven baskets.

“These will all bloom,” said Holmes, and there was genuine wonder in his tone.

“The cane’s all been taken for firewood,” burst out Meek, “and kindling, even.” Still he twisted his fingers together, as if he longed to be weaving, but he seemed to be regaining mastery of his nerves.

“So you used what you could find.” Holmes smiled. “Remarkable. I shall have to acquire one for my housekeeper, ere I depart. And I shall have to return and watch you work, Private, if I may; it is always a pleasure to see a true craftsman at his art.”

Upon which, with surprising tact, my friend turned away, trusting me to follow. When we were nearly at the crest of the hill, he turned to salute Meek with a wave.

“Well, Watson,” said he, and I heard the thrum of pleasure in his voice, “we have done a good day’s work, for there is one heart eased already.”

It was no less than truth. I, preoccupied with the maladies of those whose needs were more acute and more apparent, had not realized that the conscientious Londoner had begun to fear the very instruments of his trade as holding a potentially lethal power. Holmes had seen all. And Meek had known he would.

“My dear Holmes,” I said, “I have missed you more than I can express.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for graphic description of incidents associated with trench warfare. Some of these, here part of an original character's backstory, are, in part, loosely based on the letters of Wilfred Owen, and in part drawn from the wartime experiences of that iconic Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone.

_If the weather is not too cool, early in the morning, before the bees are stirring, will be the best time, as there will be less danger of annoyance from robber-bees. — Langstroth, The Hive and the Honey-Bee_

Holmes, as I have remarked elsewhere, was not a habitually early riser. And so it was with a jolt of surprise that I looked out my bedroom window, the following morning, to behold his unmistakable figure in the quadrangle. He stood quite motionless, his shoulders hunched against the cold and his eyes fixed upon the ground, resembling nothing so much as some great brooding bird of prey.

I hastened to complete my toilette that I might join him. I did so with no little apprehension. In the former years of our association, Holmes had sometimes been wont to call me a harbinger of crime. Beholding him, standing lone and portentous as a prophet in the winter dawn, I could not help but fear what I had called down on us all by inviting him to Seale Hayne. I knew that certainty would be preferable to doubt; but what new nightmare possibilities might be opened along our path I could not say, and in that moment I quailed from knowing them.

“Watson,” said Holmes, without turning his head to look at me. I confess that I was warmed, even on that chilly morning, to think that he still knew my step. 

“Holmes.” I stared with him at the flags, but could see no trace of blood; my mind’s eye, however, was all too ready to conjure the image of Ashby lying on the spot whereon my friend’s gaze was fixed. “How?” I asked.

“The grass,” said Holmes. “It grows differently here, and many of the blades have been broken — I infer spilled blood, and a scrubbing brush.” I shivered involuntarily.

“Tell me,” continued Holmes, “precisely what happened on that morning: what you did, what you saw, and what you suspected.” He spoke quietly, but the command was unequivocal. I swallowed.

“I had come out early,” I said, “a little after seven, I think. The fogs had not risen. I heard and saw nothing as I descended — nothing and no one. I am quite sure of that. I emerged from the northeast stair. I had some vague idea, I think, of inspecting the wards after taking the air. It would have been madness to go onto the moors in such weather.”

“And the men would have known that?”

I shrugged unhappily. “Those in their right minds.”

“Very well. Pray continue.”

“Turner came up to me. He was… obviously distressed. He could not speak. I did not assume that anything particular had occurred to upset him; that is, I thought it far more likely that some apparent trifle had overset him after the shock of the Armistice. I must make you understand, Holmes!” The plea was unworthy of me, doubtless; but I felt that I could not abandon Turner’s reactions to be itemized and catalogued and analyzed by Holmes without further explanation of his case.

“He once lost a boot in No Man’s Land,” I said, “because he stepped on — in — a decaying corpse, during a recklessly dangerous reconnaissance mission for which he volunteered. He saw a friend killed while peeling potatoes. And he had to finish the job. When they had their soup, that night, Turner fancied he could taste the man’s blood, and my God, Holmes, the worst of it is that he may have been right.” I found that I was trembling myself, recounting it. 

“And?” inquired Holmes coldly. 

“And he could not speak when he came to us,” I returned, matching his coldness with my own. “The injuries to his face had healed — that’s what finally got him out; he withstood the rest very well, as far as the Army was concerned. No, it took shrapnel to his face to get him out of the trenches. But he could not speak. Mrs. Strotter worked with him for weeks, getting him to talk with her about the weather, about books he was reading, about how he took his tea. Then one day he saw Carlton bringing in new potatoes, and burst into tears. And Carlton brought him to me.” 

“So,” said Holmes, after a few moments’ silence. “So, you thought — what?”

“I hardly know. But who knows what he might not have recalled? One of the myriad false rumors of peace, perhaps; or he might have woken from a dream of forgotten horrors, or glimpsed a pattern of light that recalled to him I know not what.” I swallowed again. “I followed him. And he led me to Ashby — he led me, Holmes, whimpering and plucking at my sleeve, like a child, or like a man driven mad.” I added the last half against my will; but to prevaricate or dissemble with Holmes would have been worse than useless.

Holmes sighed deeply. “He led you to Ashby.”

“Yes. The body was already cold. It… he obviously lay where he had fallen.”

Holmes nodded. “Was Turner wearing his greatcoat?”

I glanced sharply at him. “I — yes. Yes, but I do not see how — ”

“No,” said Holmes, not altogether unkindly. “No matter for the present.” Turning from me, he proceeded to pace to the corner with his eyes on the leaden sky, a singularly unrewarding prospect, or so it seemed to me. At the angle of the quad, he turned, and measured again the ground between us.

“Who occupies this wing?” His tones were clipped and peremptory. If I reflected that my friend’s impatience with less alert intelligences than his own had not lessened with the years, I kept such observations prudently unvoiced.

“But few men, at present.” I made my reply with deliberate calmness. “The ward is reserved for those with acute symptoms and…”

Holmes waved a dismissive hand. “Not now, man — at the time of Ashby’s death.”

“I do not think — wait a moment — King has joined the regular wards, and Sanderson. Challoner is still there, along with Benson, young Davis, and Smith; that is, we call him Smith, for his real name we do not know. We have hopes of him yet. Meek was an amnesiac when he arrived, and you have seen…”

“Four men in all?” interrupted Holmes.

“But four who were there at the Armistice; others have arrived since. And there are the staff.”

“Of course.” Holmes’ expression was not in the least lightened by this acquisition of new data.

“The movements of staff and patients will be mutually assured,” said I. “Most especially in these acute cases, the medical notes will be both copious and methodical. I can, of course, interpret the handwriting of my fellow medicos if necessary,” I added, for I am afraid that I was piqued by Holmes’ remoteness in the face of Ashby’s tragedy, and of those other tragedies played out in the sickbeds of Seale Hayne.

The ghost of a smile played over my friend’s thin lips. “I do not think such presumption upon your valuable time will be required. That door there, above the Great Hall; whence does it lead?”

I opened my mouth, and shut it again, forbearing to ask him how he knew that the door stood above the Great Hall, once used for naval banquets, now a space for King George’s soldiers to relearn the business of walking; nor do I believe that the latter was the less noble use to which its noble vaults had borne witness. “To a former servant’s bedroom, I believe,” said I; “it is disused now.”

“Ah!” A light in my friend’s keen grey eyes spoke of some excitement which I was powerless to fathom, but an instant later his visage was somber once more. “And whither does that pathway go?” 

“Everywhere and nowhere,” said I. “The staff of that wing come that way to breakfast, I believe.”

“Let us retrace their steps, friend Watson; we are early enough to risk no encounters.” I served as my companion’s unenlightened guide, ascending the still-quiet stairwells of the hospital. Faint sounds of ceramic and metal spoke of the commencement of the day’s work on the wards, but we encountered no one. It was as well, I thought; Sherlock Holmes on the scent of a clue could be a forbidding figure.

When we had reached the door, my friend lost no time in prostrating himself on the flags before it, despite the chill of the morning, and my own joints ached in sympathy.

“Holmes,” I protested, “it has been weeks. Surely all traces must have long since vanished.”

“I am aware of the likelihood of that eventuality, Watson,” retorted my friend with some asperity, but he did not look up from his investigations. At length he rose, groaning. “No,” he said briefly, “nothing. But I had to be sure that there was nothing. Now — ” and to my ever-increasing astonishment, he treated the handle and fingerplate of the door with insufflated powder, inside and out. “Nothing,” said he again, but he sounded more relieved than disheartened. “Nothing. Pray God we may continue to find nothing.” I glanced at him sharply, but not another word did he utter as he went through the opened door. He did so with what seemed to me exaggerated care, insinuating his thin form into the hallway only after he examined the space he would occupy on the other side. To my surprise, he shut it after him, leaving me on the outside.

“Holmes!”

He held up a deprecatory hand. “The key, Watson.” 

“Never used!” I shouted back. I was beginning to feel that we made ourselves ridiculous, and more than beginning to feel the cold.

“But there is one!”

“Yes.”

“Use it, then.”

Sighing, I extracted my keys and did as my friend bade me. As the lock clicked home, he signed to me to leave the key where it was; I saw him draw out his magnifying glass and examine the keyhole narrowly. When he straightened, his face was pale and grave. At his wordless command, I unlocked the door. He opened it, but did not speak for a moment, regarding me bleakly over the threshold.

“Watson,” said he, “take my glass and look at the fingerplate.” I obeyed him without a murmur. “Tell me what you see.”

“Scratches, Holmes,” said I, “such as might be caused by the hasty locking of the door.”

“Precisely.”

“And?”

“By your own testimony, Watson, this door has no cause to be locked from the inside; is it not so?”

I felt the blood drain from my cheeks, and for a moment I could fashion no reply. 

“It is no use, my boy,” said Holmes gently. “The marks are neither fresh nor ancient. There is a scuff on this inner wall, where a man’s elbow might have met it. The matting is old, too worn to take impressions, but even in this light, you can see where it has been moved from its resting place of many years — see, where the faded floorboards meet those once protected.”

“Holmes!” I cried. “You were looking for such marks! You suspected villainy, then?” 

My friend smiled mirthlessly. “Let us say that I was prepared for it. It is an ugly business, Watson, and the more I see of it the less I like it. Still — we must do what we can to shed light in the darkness.”


	9. Chapter 9

_At the door of life by the gate of breath,_  
_There are worse things waiting for men than death._  
_— Swinburne, The Triumph of Time_

At breakfast, Holmes discoursed of his theories on architectural design, while I consumed what little I could with a sickened heart. For the rest of the morning, I saw nothing of my friend, and it is as well, I think, that I did not.

Turner and I built card houses. Afterwards, I let him win money from me at cards, as consolation for the betrayal of his shaking hands. It was a mild deception — I took my own consolation from the power to offer even so small a comfort. I found Reynell when I went for a cup of tea.

“Stewed, sweetened tea, drunk standing,” said he, as he raised his cup to me as if in a toast. “I think it’s how the war was won.”

“Astonishing it didn’t make it into the pamphlets,” said I, preparing my own from the urn. “The Hun’s true weakness — his denial of the restorative powers of tea.”

“Lifeblood of the Empire,” Reynell agreed, mock-serious. “Sanderson’s doing well,” he added after a moment. “I think you ought to have a look at Smith, though.”

“Oh yes?” Reynell was proud of his own expertise, and it was unusual for him to ask counsel. I joined him at the window, allowing us both the vista of the quad.

“It’s not about the shuffle,” he said. I waited. “He looks at me like a lost child wanting to be led home. I know, it’s unlike me to get sentimental. But it’s getting on my nerves, this business.” Before I could reply, he continued: “That his trust should survive, beyond everything! He doesn’t even know his _name_ , where he’s been, what he’s done, but he still looks to authority, God help him!”

“It is perhaps preferable that he should do so,” I suggested softly, “than that he should look to nothing at all, or turn his gaze only inward upon himself.”

“Perhaps.” Reynell’s tone was bitter.

“I’ll look at him,” I promised, and added, to break the silence: “How’s Challoner faring?”

“Oh, well enough.” Reynell turned to refill his cup, to avoid my gaze. “Hurst is fascinated; he’ll wax rhapsodic about the digestive tract upon the slightest provocation.”

“Dear me!”

“Yes. And yet each of us has his own pet enthusiasm, I suppose. Nervous diseases, the power of suggestion…” Uncharacteristically, he checked himself. “But I mustn’t keep you from your patients, Dr. Watson.” Half-ruefully I saluted him with my teacup.

“You know,” continued Reynell, “they ought to give you a medal.”

“Oh, come now!”

“To fight to repair men’s health in the aftermath of one war, when another ruined your own? Not many would do it.”

“Not many would describe my career thus baldly,” I returned drily. “I thank you — I think — for the compliment. Get some rest, Reynell.”

He nodded in acknowledgement and I left him, mulling over his unwonted transparency.

It was my especial care in those days to work with the men who came to us still, either those freshly demobilized, or those survivors of war who found themselves defeated by peace. Hurst was ever plausible and determined, but even he could not be omnipresent. To guide, to counsel, and to cheer — the war had transmuted these simple acts of human charity into efforts requiring the knowledge and the patience granted by medical practice. Men came in faith and despair, in skepticism and confidence. I told them other men’s stories, and promised them the possibility of recovery. I thought of what Reynell had said, and of Falstaff, muttering about food for powder. I wondered if Shakespeare’s groundlings had laughed, as men in the trenches laughed. ( _If you live, you needn’t worry: and — if you die, you can’t worry! So why worry?_ ) I tried to feel that what I was doing was not an act of deception or of hypocrisy, but rather a testimony to hope, however fragile and beleaguered such hope might be.

By mid-afternoon, I was half-stifled, and went into the quad to try what exercise could do to refresh me. I had scarcely gone half a dozen paces, however, before I was arrested by the sight of Holmes and Rattisbon sharing a smoke. 

“Tell me,” said Rattisbon, “what do you make of it all?”

“The hospital?” Holmes spoke around his pipe stem; I feared he was not sufficiently on his guard. “I confess it inspires me with something like awe; it is a tremendous undertaking.”

“A tremendous undertaking,” parroted Rattisbon. “A hundred men at a time, out of an army of how many hundred thousand? And with how many thousand thousands pulped into the mud, not even buried?”

Even from where I stood, I could see that Rattisbon’s cigarette shook in his hand. The blueish smoke of Holmes’ pipe rose steadily into the air, and I inhaled with it the atmosphere of home, a comfort I had not been conscious of missing. Holmes watched the other man, and did not speak.

“Yes,” said Victor Rattisbon, in response to the mustering silence. “Yes, I was buried too.”

“I have seen a man’s reason shaken by less.” Holmes spoke quietly enough that only the stonework carried his voice to me.

“So tell me,” repeated Rattisbon, “what do you make of it all? You’re a genius; tell me how one survives a war.” I wondered if Holmes heard the edge of hysteria in his voice.

“Patient suffering,” began my friend. Rattisbon interrupted him with a bitter laugh. “Hear me out, Sergeant. When I say that it may be a lesson to an impatient world, I do not mean that it represents—” he waved a long, thin hand— “a too-easily-embraced ideal, unanchored to this world’s realities. No; it is simply that I have not ceased to believe in its power to reproach the wicked, and — if you will — to inspire those who, despite everything, remain on the side of the angels.” There was something incongruously wolfish in Holmes’ grin. “Old-fashioned terms, I know.”

“Anachronistic ones,” said Rattisbon tersely.

“Perhaps.”

“Christianity is dead.” Rattisbon’s voice shook. “How else could ten million men have marched out to slaughter? Did any moral force stop that war? No. Christianity is dead — dead!”

“I said nothing about Christianity,” returned Holmes, outwardly imperturbable as ever. “My friend Dr. Watson, who is tactfully hovering in the archway, will tell you that I have long been bohemian in habit. One can argue for divine goodness, or for the senseless cruelty of the world, on much the same evidence. And I have always said that it is a mistake to theorize ahead of one’s data.” His brief smile held something of self-mockery, but nothing of bitterness.

“Dr. Watson,” Rattisbon greeted me as I came up to them. He threw down his cigarette, and ground it under his heel. “I know, I should be ashamed of myself.”

“No,” I said firmly, “you should not. But you should put your overcoat on, if you are going to stand around in these fogs.”

Rattisbon laughed. It was always an incongruous expression on his face, with its livid scars and one good eye. “The good doctor,” said he, and I was surprised to hear no mockery in his voice. “I can see why you call him that. Good afternoon, Mr. Holmes; Dr. Watson.” I watched him out of sight.

“He’s a proud man,” I said.

“Yes.”

I scratched my ear thoughtfully. “Do you know,” I said, “whatever else I expected, Holmes, I confess that I did not anticipate that your role here would be that of a father confessor.”

My friend smiled. “You yourself are responsible for that, my dear Watson. In the absence of a credible Deity, small wonder that men turn to the omniscient reasoner of the _Strand_.”

I found no response to that, and we smoked in silence for a few moments.

“Tell me,” said Holmes, “about the others who were with you, the night of the Armistice.”

I drew a deep breath. I had known this duty was but postponed. “Turner and Carlton,” I said, “you have met. Turner’s reaction to the death I cannot entirely explain. He was clerk in a London shipping office before the war. He may never, it is true, be able to return to that profession; close work gives him headaches, and the noises of the docks… But he does very well with the bees. We sell the honey. He goes into the town himself to do so, sometimes. Since the Armistice, however…”

“Since the Armistice,” interrupted Holmes. “I beg you to be precise, Watson: it is to the Armistice that you date the deterioration of his condition, and not to finding — we shall say finding, for the moment — Ashby’s body?”

“I do,” said I, as firmly as I could.

“Very well; pray continue.”

“Since the Armistice,” I repeated, “he has lost ground — the military expression is, I fear, all too apt. He trembles; his speech is less ready; he is _afraid_ , I would say, but of what I am powerless to discern or discover. Carlton you know. I’m tempted to say that Carlton will be fine, as long as he stays above-ground in future life. He was sobered by Ashby’s death, certainly, but has borne up strongly. He’s good with the animals, and good at showing the other men how to handle them. I know we’ve seen villainous men trusted by horses before, Holmes, but I cannot imagine Carlton as other than sound; there’s no duplicity about him.”

Holmes, sucking on his pipe stem, was as inscrutable as the sphinx, and I resigned myself to continuing.

“Rattisbon you have just seen, of course. He is deep, and can — I must confess it — be volatile. He plays chess with Merrison and Reynell, though,” I added hopefully. Still Holmes was silent. “He must have been a handsome man,” I said; “I have not heard of any woman in his life, but I do not know what might have been, before… And of course he is told again and again how fortunate he is to have survived, and I do not think he feels it.

“Merrison started the war as a private, and is now a lieutenant. That alone tells you something of the quality of the man. He is intelligent and observant, and he’s very good with the men. He hasn’t lost his sense of humor, either, which is remarkable. He still has nightmares, but he’s much improved. You’ll have to see the film he directed — “The Battle of Seale Hayne.” I would have thought it the least suitable of subjects, but apparently they all entered into the spirit of the thing; they filmed it on the farm. He is determined to master himself entirely, and I think he’ll get there, in the end. Or close enough to make a life, at any rate.”

“And as for the medical staff?”

“Myself, of course.” I hesitated.

“We shall take your character as known,” said Holmes with a smile; “proceed.”

“Reynell has felt the strain of Ashby’s death very much. He has been here since the beginning, and… he is not a man who likes to feel helpless in the face of suffering. I suppose none of us is. His wife, Ida, keeps our accounts; she’s a shy woman, I think, and invariably retires early. Gladys and Margaret — that is, Misses Reynell and McPherson — join the assembly unselfconsciously, as does Mrs. Strotter. They’re lovely women, and quite devoted to each other… you surely don’t think this could have been a woman’s crime, Holmes?”

Holmes shook his head. “I allow myself to think nothing, at present. And Hurst?”

“His intelligence,” I said slowly, “is a restless one. I fancy that he may seek new challenges, especially now that Ashby… but perhaps I do him an injustice. Something Reynell said made me think of it. And for all his proprietary passion, he has permitted me to oversee many of the newly admitted patients of late.”

“He is a fine judge of human nature,” said Holmes quietly, “whatever else he may be.”

“Well! We also, of course, have voluntary workers — from the Voluntary Aid Detachments, the Red Cross, St John's Ambulance — who will join us from time to time.”

“But those who were there on the night of the Armistice were all those who routinely assembled, and included all members of the medical staff who routinely worked with Ashby.”

I sighed; there would be no evading this. “Yes.” I knew it would be useless to remonstrate with him; he would weigh all possibilities without allowing emotion to turn the scales by a hair.

“Capital, Watson,” said Holmes. “You have been both lucid and thorough, and I thank you.” This was an unaccustomed tribute, and I forbore to tease him by asking if he were sickening for something.

“They should have put you behind a desk,” added Holmes after a moment. I would have made some jesting reply; but then I saw his face, and the laughter died on my lips. “They should have put you behind a desk,” he repeated, “and let your compassion illuminate those who saw in scores and in hundreds of human lives only equations to be balanced.”

I stared at him. After a moment, his features relaxed briefly into a smile, and he laid a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let me blacken your mood, Watson,” said he, and strode away before I could make reply, his melancholy apparently transformed into grim purpose. I watched him down the drive, until his figure had vanished behind the first of Dartmoor’s rolling hills.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The semi-ironical salute to stewed, sweetened tea as the fuel of medical staff during WWI is inspired by a similar tribute in Vera Brittain's _Testament of Youth._
> 
> Hurst's interest in the digestive tract is a matter of historical record. After WWI, and thus for most of his career, he specialized in alimentary disorders and was an internationally recognized leader in gastro-enteric medicine. Challoner here is an imagined catalyst for this interest; fellow whodunit readers may recognize him as Dick "Tin-Tummy" Challoner of Dorothy L. Sayers' _The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club_.
> 
> Rattisbon's passionate declaration of Christianity's loss of credibility as a result of the war is taken from none other than Arthur Conan Doyle.


	10. Chapter 10

_The pain caused by an injury to a limb may lead to hysterical paralysis in a man recovering consciousness after shell-shock, even if there is no actual wound and the injury is comparatively trivial.— Medical Diseases of the War, Dr. Arthur F. Hurst_

Holmes did not appear at dinner that evening. I fretted over his absence, and was gently chaffed for so doing by Gladys Reynell, but the rest of the company seemed more relieved than disquieted. The conversation ran in its normal channels. Mrs. Strotter and I discussed the soldiers’ therapy, while Hurst discoursed to Reynell on the relationship of internal medicine to neurological disorders. We were late leaving the table, and as we progressed to the sitting room, I was perhaps the least surprised of the group — and yet my wonder was not small — to hear the unmistakable strains of a violin.

Holmes played to an empty room, and he played no recognizable tune, guided seemingly by whim from one succession of notes to another, from bowing the strings to plucking them, with silences in between. He stopped when we entered, as if caught out in something.

“Oh, _do_ continue, Mr. Holmes!” It was Mrs. Strotter’s exclamation. He shook his head at first, but the other ladies joined their entreaties to hers, and he could hardly have refused without being guilty of a discourtesy. The point being yielded, we disposed ourselves to listen as full of anticipation as any concert hall audience.

And yet Holmes did not play. For several moments, he stood silent, his fingers playing silently over the strings of his instrument, his bow twitching restlessly in his other hand, as if impatient for employment. 

At last, and to my very great delight, Holmes began the opening movement of the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Within the first few bars, he had already surprised me, ending the first repeated phrase as a forlorn and yearning echo, rather than a renewed assertion. In his silences, I was sure, he could hear an orchestra. I watched, with fascination, the action of his long fingers on the bridge of the instrument, marveling at his ability not only to disappear into a world of his own making, but to make the contours of his imaginings palpable to his listeners. He played with febrile energy, and I was spellbound — as were we all. I confess that I held my breath as he drew out the cadenza, the notes playing against each other, over each other, intertwining, as if in a lovers’ argument, until the breathless, fierce ostinato figure of its conclusion. Holmes played with an intensity that seemed to conjure the orchestra, to dare opposition. As the movement closed in its final, sparkling phrase, those around me broke into applause. And I? I was arrested by the expression on his face. It spoke of a fierce exultation, as when of old he had seen an apparently fantastic theory proved beyond doubt. This look of almost savage gratification was familiar to me; but I was at a loss to say why it should play over his features in this moment.

Turner then took his accustomed place at the piano, and he and Holmes partnered each other in a succession of easy or sentimental pieces — from Schubert’s Serenade to “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” — but I must confess that I listened with an abstracted mind.

***

The next day, Holmes went in to Newton Abbott, an intention he declared at the breakfast table. If he expected a reaction, he received none that I could discern. I followed him to the courtyard, with no excuse but my own instinctive solicitude.

“Don’t _fuss,_ Watson,” said Holmes, adding more gently: “Your patients are here. And I will use discretion.”

“Would you like me to drive you, Mr. Holmes?” called Carlton after him.

“No, no,” returned Holmes airily, waving a hand in acknowledgement. He was already striding briskly across the quadrangle. “ _Solvitur ambulando!_ ”

At Seale Hayne, the day passed uneventfully enough. Turner brought his card house to a height of two stories, and I was able to praise him for that accomplishment and for his steady piano-playing the previous evening. He only remarked wryly, however, that it might be hard to earn a living as a parlor pianist, even one who could do card tricks. My session with Smith was no more cheerful; he remained fearful, silent, and withal pitifully trusting. 

With these meetings at the beginning and end of a working day filled with the performance of reassurance and encouragement, of therapy and evaluation, I found myself more than ready for bed by evening. I begged off the usual hours of social company, and retired gratefully to solitude.

I was on the very threshold of my room when arrested by a hissed summons. “Watson!” My friend’s head had been thrust into the corridor. I went to him, taking care to tread softly, with only a moment’s repining for the bed that awaited me.

My friend’s strong fingers closed over my wrist and drew me into his room. “Ah, Watson,” he murmured when the door had shut behind us. “Forgive my unpardonable forestalling of your well-earned rest, but you are truly an invaluable interlocutor.”

I was neither impervious to such flattery, nor unamused by it. “Well?” I countered. “What light am I to reflect this time, and do you have a spare pair of slippers?”

The corners of his mouth winged upwards in a quick smile. “None at all, I fear; slippers next to the chest of drawers.” His dressing gown was wrapped around him as though he felt the cold, though the fire burned cheerfully enough. 

“Watson, my boy,” said Holmes, and his tone was grave, “I want to talk to you.”

“I am all attention.” This was not strictly true, as I was engaged in unlacing my shoes, but it was nearly so, and Holmes waited until I faced him with slippered feet stretched to the fire.

“My day in Newton Abbot has been productive of far more dramatic results than I had anticipated. I received reports of a mysterious foreigner, and caused a young woman to drop a teacup.”

I confess that I laughed outright. “Really, Holmes!” 

My friend stretched himself, cat-like, in his chair. “Indeed. I represented myself as a writer of human interest stories for a London magazine.” I attempted in vain to stifle a laugh, and was silenced only by his raised eyebrow. “I am in the area, you must understand, visiting a friend (yourself) and only incidentally looking for local color.”

“Really, Holmes,” said I for the second time.

He sighed. “I repaired, of course, to The Jolly Abbot at the first opportunity.” 

“Of course,” I murmured, but was again quelled by a glance.

“Apart from the size of the marrows this year, and the remarkable feats performed by the women of the Land Army — in which I was careful to demonstrate the liveliest interest — the chief topic of conversation was the irregular and mysterious visitations of a Sikh to the neighborhood. You do not count any such among your patients, do you?” I shook my head. 

“I thought you would have told me of it,” said Holmes with a satisfied air. “I lingered some time, going so far as to stand the company a round, yet nothing definite could I learn of this visitor. I surmise him to be a man with a military bearing, dressed in civilian clothes, but this is a matter of inference — I spare you all references to his sinister air.”

“Thank you,” said I. “There was a Sikh waiting for the London train the day I met you, but I presumed he was visiting some erstwhile military comrade in the vicinity… or such a man’s relatives.”

“So you have seen him!” cried Holmes eagerly. “And you would have said his carriage was military?”

I shook my head. “I am not sure why I thought so. I suppose because I assumed that was the most likely reason for his presence in Newton Abbot. And — yes, Holmes — I think it was because of the manner in which he waited for the train. I could not keep from pacing, but he sat in perfect stillness. I inferred the lessons of troop transport, or of the trenches.”

“Capital, Watson,” said Holmes; his voice thrilled with excitement, and I thrilled to his praise.

“Thank you, Holmes. But tell me of the young woman and the teacup.”

“Ah yes. She is the proprietress, in fact, of a tea room, a pretty, chintz-covered place in Queen Street — faded carpets, amateur watercolors — you know the sort of place.”

“I do,” said I, “though it is unlike you to wax poetic on such matters, Holmes.”

“Is it? Do I? Ah well, no matter. My motives in seeking it out were chiefly practical, and dictated by the rooms’ chief function, though I confess I had been intrigued by the accounts I had received of Miss Hooper’s enterprise in taking the business over from her parents, both, I was informed, sadly taken by the influenza.

“At all events,” continued Holmes, “I fell into conversation with the women at the next table, and at length remarked on how impressive it was that the inhabitants of the town were not made at all nervous by the proximity of the hospital.”

I frowned. “Such attitudes hardly need encouraging, Holmes, even by so mild a suggestion.”

“Forgive me, Watson. But the experiment proved instructive. The remark itself did not appear to discompose my interlocutors, nor the intrepid Miss Hooper. One of the women mentioned that she had bought a market basket from a boy with a marred face — your Sergeant Turner — and that it was wonderful what they could do these days. Her companion rejoined that, moreover, they had no cause for alarm, as it was only on such peaceable and useful errands that the soldiers ventured into town. It was at this juncture, Watson, that Miss Hooper dropped the teacup.” Holmes sat back with an expectant air.

“I am all at sea, Holmes,” I confessed.

My friend hummed meditatively. “These episodes suggest nothing to you, either separately or taken together? They suggest no incident, however minor, of your life at Seale Hayne that might have unexpected relevance?”

I scratched my chin. “If the Sikh soldier — for so, I suppose, we may call him — came as a visitor to Seale Hayne, I would assuredly have known of it. Likewise I cannot imagine that any of our men could have gone to Newton Abbot on errands less than peaceable. Not always on the hospital’s business, true; Hurst is a great believer in the value of small outings to accustom the men to civilian society, and of course there are few objections among the convalescents to taking a pint, but how could that discomfit Miss Hooper? In any case, I hardly think they would be likely to visit a tea shop covered in chintz, especially with rationing the way it is.”

“No,” agreed Holmes, to my surprise, “it does seem obscure.”

“Then I fear I have been of little value.” I stifled a yawn.

“Quite the contrary, Watson, I assure you — but I have kept you too long from your bed, my dear fellow.”

I was in no mood to demur, and bidding Holmes good night, retired at last. Not even the enigmas of the Sikh and the teacup could keep me from a sleep that was swift and sound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Schubert's Serenade as arranged for violin and piano may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=widDAQKdlUA. It need not be so extensively ornamented by the violinist, and the piano part is fairly easily playable even by an indifferent pianist (evidence: author's experience.) In describing Holmes' playing of the Mendelssohn, I was inspired by this interpretation by Hilary Hahn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dBg__wsuo. Miss Hooper's tea shop is fictitious, but The Jolly Abbot (the nearest public house, fount of information) is not.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Belated installment for 11/12. Next chapter should be up 11/26.

__

_Whenever the angry excitation is diffused through a whole community, a great accession of heat is produced in the hive. — Edward Bevan, M.D., The Honey-Bee: Its Natural History, Physiology, and Management_

It is strange to me, even now, to reflect on the optimism with which I began the next day. Turner and I met after breakfast, as was our wont. My early morning rounds had been heartening; Rattisbon, despite everything, had slept well, and Smith at least showed an interest when I spoke to him. 

Turner struck me as more withdrawn than usual, but also calmer. We began the ritual of building our card houses. The first attempt collapsed, but Turner barely paused in his work, raising the fallen cards, balancing them between his hands. I could not have said what kind of footling nonsense I was talking, merely to encourage him. I was afraid of breaking his concentration by seeming to attend to closely to what he was doing, as three cards, then six, then nine, stood in arches as miraculous as those of Stonehenge. 

I watched him in awe, and let myself run on, in what I hoped was a comforting, normal drone, distracting him from any potential nervousness, as he built the house. His hands were miraculously steady, and I could have shouted aloud. At last, he erected the pediment at its top, and I had to keep my own hands and voice from shaking.

“Turner,” I began — and stopped, for he met my eyes with an unwonted coldness, and yet a heat of resolve that was unmistakeable.

“She’s innocent as the day.” 

I was entirely mystified. Of whom did he speak? Had I made some reference he was disputing? Surely not; I had never taken delight in following sensation trials in the newspapers. More than half my attention had been occupied in watching his marvelously steady hands, in inarticulate prayer, in silent rejoicing — in anything but attending to what I myself was saying.

“What?” I feared that a careless breath might knock over the cards. I feared that my clumsy inattention might cost Turner the relief of a long-withheld confession.

“She is as innocent as the day.” His voice trembled slightly, but his hands were still steady on the green baize of the table.

“Turner,” I said, “my dear fellow, I really must apologize, but I am at a loss. Who is innocent, and of what?”

He swallowed. Steadily he gazed at me, his brown eyes liquid with entreaty. “The,” he said, and stopped.

“In your own time, Turner,” I said. I suddenly knew, with wrenching and intense clarity, that I could not have borne to have a son in this war. The house of cards still stood between us, precious and fragile.

“The teacup girl,” managed Turner, and was again silent, his face working. As his doctor, I desired nothing more than to put an end to his distress; nothing would have been easier than to assure him that she was under no suspicion. As Holmes’ associate, however, I knew that I must forestall no revelation.

“The girl with the teacup,” said Turner again. “It — she — it was on my account that she dropped it.”

I frowned. “How do you mean, Turner?”

He merely shook his head, slowly at first, and then with more vehemence.

“I promise you,” said I, “that she will come to no harm, if she is innocent as you say.” The past four years had made a mockery of all such promises, but I dared to hope he might still trust it from my lips.

He smiled — it was a smile of surprising sweetness, drawing first at the side of his mouth disfigured by the scarring of shrapnel. “Ask her,” he said. “It’s not… not mine to tell.”

I sighed. “You may have to speak to Mr. Holmes about it.”

Turner’s smile widened conspiratorially. “If I can… can speak, that is.”

I could not help but return his smile. “You’re doing marvelously, Turner.” I gestured at the house of cards. “Look, man! I have no doubt but that you’ll continue to make progress.” He shrugged, and ducked his head a little. “You’ve done a good morning’s work,” said I, “and the weather is fair. As your doctor, I recommend a brisk walk.”

When I came down to luncheon that afternoon, I was still mulling over what I would say of this incident to Holmes. I knew that I risked much both in speech and silence.

“The key thing,” Hurst was saying when I came in, “is that the war can be understood as but one part of their lives. Not all of them may be able to do so, of course; not all of them may wish to. But if we are to have any hope of recovering from this war — all of us, not just the soldiers — it cannot, I think, be treated as a thing entirely other. To treat it as unremarkable would be patronizing, to treat it as mundane…”

“Obscene,” said Holmes, his voice cutting across Hurst’s monologue.

“Quite so.” Hurst seemed no less surprised than I by Holmes’ interruption. For some moments we wielded our cutlery in silence.

“They’ve directed a film about it, you know,” said Mrs. Strotter.

Holmes raised his head sharply. “Indeed?”

“Yes.” It was Hurst who answered the question. “Pathé let them use the cameras and film; all the directing and acting was done by the men. Lieutenant Merrison, whom you’ve met — he was the brain behind most of it. Amazing effects they all got… and most illuminating, of course, to see how they conceived of the war.”

“Or how they thought it should be portrayed for the great British public.” I frowned warningly at Holmes across the table. “May we see the film?”

“Hm? Oh, of course,” said Hurst; “we have the reel here somewhere. You’ll have to go into Newton Abbot to play it, though. Cinema’s in the Abbotsbury Road.” I kept my head down over my cauliflower cheese. I was not about to intervene in this episode. 

“Capital,” said Holmes, to my surprise. “We shall go after lunch.”

“We?” It was Hurst who spoke.

“If you have no objection.” I knew of few men who had dared to object when Holmes used that tone. “I would be most grateful if Dr. Watson could accompany me in order to identify the men acting in the film.”

“Mm.” It was almost a growl, but Hurst raised no objection, and so, after lunch, we went.

“Really, Holmes,” said I, when we were a good half mile away from the hospital. “It seems to me that you were most unnecessarily antagonistic.”

“Indeed?”

“Indeed.” I adjusted the satchel over my shoulder. “And I don’t see why we couldn’t have had Carlton drive us; this thing is damnably heavy.”

“Give it here, then.” If Holmes had expected me to demur, he was to be disappointed: I was all too willing to have him carry the unwieldy reel of film the three miles into the village.

I need not dwell on the cajolery necessary to have the cinema given over to our use, idle though it stood. Suffice it to say that we were, in the end, seated in the flickering darkness. It was uncanny to me, to see the routines I knew so well enacted for the camera, and I focused on watching Holmes, trying to glean from his familiar countenance some clue as to the illumination he sought, or the significance he found.

At last a title card announced “The Battle of Seale Hayne,” and proclaimed that its creators were convalescent war neurosis patients.

The film did not open on a battle. It opened on farm buildings, of rough stone — our own, of course, but they might have been anywhere in France. I had seen enough of them, bullet-scarred, abandoned. A sentry was welcomed back to a knot of his comrades who stood smoking in the grange, ready to set out from this unlikely headquarters. There was something poignant to me in how regularly they stood in formation: a dozen men with shouldered rifles, the stretcher-bearers, the NCO, even a man wearing a chaplain’s stole. I tried to be cheered by how briskly and evenly they marched — Meek among them — and not to think of the theatrical bravado of that precision in the midst of simulated chaos.

“How did they make the smoke?” asked Holmes abruptly.

“Small fires in the harvested fields; it’s good for the soil.” I suspected that Holmes had hoped for more spectacular origins, and tried not to feel smug about this.

We watched the men climb a ridge to go over the top. All too soon, one of their number was falling, helpless. It was here that the reel changed from those which the public regularly saw. The camera did not follow the charge. Rather, it stayed with the drama on the scrubby hillside: the man tumbling down the scree, then the fellow-soldier carefully scanning the horizon before running over to him, bent double. For what felt like an unbearably long moment, the man bent over his wounded comrade, running his hands over his limbs, undoing the buttons of his uniform, checking for blood. I did not look at Holmes. The grand climax of the reel was the advent of the stretcher-bearers, dwarfed by the landscape, but hurrying valiantly up the hillside, raising the wounded man between them, retreating from the battle. Retreating to safety? The film made no such claim.

The day was already darkening around us by the time we made our way back to Seale Hayne, caught between the shadow of the moors and the shadows of the sky, separated only by a narrow band of flame. We walked in silence, but an increasingly companionable one.

As we approached the hospital, a figure came flying out of the archway to meet us. Holmes and I quickened our steps in tandem, and soon we were running as well. It was Cushla Strotter whom we met, and her hair and her eyes were wild. She caught at my arm for support, but it was my friend to whom she spoke first.

“Oh, Mr. Holmes,” she gasped, “do come! Dr. Watson, do come! It’s Arthur; they’ve tried to kill Arthur.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Seale Hayne film may be found here: https://youtu.be/D1MixQbB-K0?t=23m50s I admit that it is implausible that a town of Newton Abbot's size would have had a cinema, but I couldn't find definite evidence, its current cinema is housed in a Victorian building, and I needed Holmes and Watson to watch the reel. In the Master's own words, we must ask for an amnesty in that direction.


	12. Chapter 12

__

_With no thought but for the tragedy that had come upon them, the bees were rushing madly to and fro in the hive, not paying the slightest attention to the fact that their house was falling asunder piecemeal, and the sudden sunshine riddling it through and through, where had been nothing but Cimmerian darkness before. — The Bee-Master of Warrilow, Tickner Edwardes, 1907_

Without pause for question, we ran. In Mrs. Strotter’s wake we crossed the quad, where knots of nurses and men, arrested in their routines, gazed and murmured. We followed Mrs. Strotter to Reynell’s office, where we found Hurst in a chair, very pale, but breathing, his collar undone, Reynell with one broad hand on his chest.

“Useless!” It was a growl from Holmes; I hoped Cushla Strotter had not heard it. “Where did it happen?” This he demanded in piercing tones, and somewhat to my surprise, Mrs. Strotter responded by turning in her tracks and leading him away.

My place was, for once, not at Holmes’ side. I advanced close enough to Reynell to receive orders, not enough to impede his range of motion.

“Get the other window open, would you, Watson?” Obediently I threw the sash open, letting in the bracing December air.

Hurst began to cough more vigorously, but Reynell appeared not to be alarmed by this. “Good man,” he said; “easy does it. Inhale on one and two…” As I appeared to be superfluous to requirements, I confined my activities to shutting the door leading into the corridor, and examining Hurst for symptoms. The lack of serious discoloration in his face or around his lips allayed my worst fear: that some poisonous gas had been used. Hurst’s and Reynell’s clothes were both perfectly clean; not poison by ingestion, then, either.

“Water,” said Reynell tersely, and I obeyed. Once he’d seen Hurst settled with the glass, he straightened, and walked over to the open windows. Clad only in his shirtsleeves, he leaned out into the winter cold, inhaling deeply. After a moment’s deliberation, I joined him.

“Asthma attack,” explained Reynell laconically, softly enough not to be heard by the recovering man in the room. 

“But not only that, surely,” I rejoined in the same tone. “Cushla Strotter would no more go into hysterics over such a thing than you or I.”

Reynell shrugged slightly. “All I know is, his fire smoked. Blocked chimney, I expect. Mrs. Strotter found him and brought him in here.”

Gravely I regarded Reynell’s profile. I could not easily suspect him of prevarication — he was habitually forthright to the point of transparency — but nor could I accept his explanation at face value. In this situation, at least, my duty seemed clear. I turned from the window; crossing to Hurst’s chair, I bent down to him in the accepted posture of professional inquiry.

“All right, Hurst?”

“I will be,” said he, removing his handkerchief from his mouth. He spoke with determination, though weakly. “No permanent harm taken.”

“What on earth happened?” 

Hurst shook his head. “Damned if I know. Morning — all as usual. Appointments with Rattisbon, Challoner, and Merrison. I was working on my case notes before lunch, and then…” He was interrupted by the dry, whistling cough of the asthmatic.

“I mustn’t worry you,” I said quickly. “I’ll let you have your rest. Believe me, it’s not — it’s not mere inquisitiveness.”

Hurst smiled wanly at me. “That, Dr. Watson,” said he, “I know very well.”

As I passed the dining hall, I was arrested by its unfamiliar hush — and, a moment later, by the clear, carrying tones of a familiar voice. Usually luncheon, for those well enough to take it in hall, was dominated by the hum of many voices and the homely noises of crockery. Today, the strong, masterful personality of Holmes dominated the scene; I put my head around the door to find him actually standing on a chair to address the assembly.

“…To the best of my knowledge,” he was saying, “you are threatened by no immediate danger. You will most assuredly be doing this entire community — ” he took in the hall with a sweeping gesture — “a great service, should you be able to tell me of anything unusual you have of late seen, heard, or perceived. I thank you.” To a smattering of applause, he then leapt down from his chair with the agility of a much younger man, and strode over to the doorway. As he exited the hall, he gathered me up with a light touch on the shoulder.

I did not speak until we were safely out of earshot of the gathering. “What the devil do you think you’re doing, Holmes?”

He glanced at me. “Gathering information,” said he, “and imparting it. Additionally, I have cast a stone into the sea, in the French phrase; I have always preferred that charming idiom to ‘setting a cat among the pigeons.’ I aim to set no feathers flying, but rather to produce ripples — no more, Watson.”

His calm served rather to infuriate me than the opposite. “You had no right,” I began, but he held up an imperious hand for silence. We had reached Hurst’s office; Holmes paused on the threshold and stood regarding the room, his hands in his pockets.

“Tell me, Watson,” said he, “the soldier who first came to succor his wounded comrade, in the film — it was Rattisbon, was it not?”

I was so taken aback by the inapposite nature of the remark that it took me some moments to gather my thoughts. “Yes,” I managed at last, “it was Rattisbon; but what can that have to do with the disaster here?”

“Perhaps nothing.” Holmes remained unruffled and inscrutable. “I hope nothing.”

I inhaled deeply. “Rattisbon was one of the soldiers Hurst met with this morning.” I knew that no good could come of concealing the fact.

“Ah yes?”

“It was Hurst’s usual routine, and has been for some weeks: Rattisbon, Challoner, and Merrison are the patients he sees in the morning.”

“Hum!” Holmes moved into the room, stepping around its perimeter with cat-like fastidiousness. I followed him, careful to use my handkerchief on the knob as I shut the door behind me. Holmes sniffed ostentatiously, but I could smell nothing on the air but smoke. 

“The chimneys are regularly cleaned,” I confessed unhappily, anticipating Holmes’ next question. What blessed relief it would be, if a mere accident were responsible for Hurst’s attack; but I saw no fall of soot staining the fireplace.

“And yet,” said Holmes musingly, “it is most assuredly from the fire that the danger came, or was perceived to come. Look — it has been doused with the water pitcher.”

I did as he bade me; the pitcher, kept for Hurst’s patients and himself, stood on the corner of the desk, with only a few inches of water still within it.

“You had no right,” I said, as evenly as I could manage, “to agitate the men like that. Whatever your ends, such means to such men…” I broke off. “Hurst will be furious when he hears of it.”

“Will he hear of it?” asked Holmes mildly, without looking up from where he knelt by the fireplace.

“Most assuredly he will. My God, Holmes! I swore an oath, long before I met you, which as a doctor I must hold sacred as my honor itself.”

Holmes did look up then, and stared at me, his hands suddenly stilled amid the ruins of the fire. “I may have asked you to break the law from time to time, Watson,” said he, “but never, I hope, have I asked of you anything which would bring the lightest shadow upon your honor.” He turned on the word, and fished from among the debris in the grate some damp and blackened fragments of paper, which he folded ceremoniously into his handkerchief.

Consciously I tightened my jaw. “My first duty, Holmes, is and must be to the men under my care.”

Holmes countered with a line from his Petrarch: “Vos vestros servate, meos mihi linquite mores.”

I stiffened. “Very well,” I said, and I am afraid that my tone was stiff as well. “Be assured that I will do so.”

“Yes, yes. And now, Watson,” said Holmes, rising briskly to his feet with his filthy bundle cupped in both hands, “I would be much obliged if you would open the door.” I obeyed but did not follow him.

For the remainder of the afternoon, I was careful to keep myself professionally occupied. I conferred with Miss Beare on the wards. I visited Meek in his studio. After consultation with Carlton, I wrote a letter of introduction on his behalf to the Earl of Carston, whose seat near Bangor — so Carlton and I hoped — might find itself in need of a groom.

I made but poor company at dinner that night, and afterwards, I busied myself with the organization of my desk. It calmed my mind, as well as giving me an excuse to avoid the gathering in the parlor. But a lifetime of medical and military discipline instills tidy habits, and it was not yet nine when I had finished. After a rather desperate round of the wards, I at last forsook my solitude. I did not wish to be seen to sulk, and I viewed it as prudent to take the chance of observing and hearing conversations for myself.

When I slipped into the parlor, I found a silent tableau before me. Miss McPherson and Miss Reynell sat together, as was their custom. Reynell and Merrison appeared to be near the end of a game of chess; Reynell, somewhat unusually, had the advantage. Holmes stood by the piano, flanked by Turner and Carlton. Carlton was pointing something out in the music that stood on the rack while Turner made a note with a pencil, Holmes observing them. I could not help but smile to see them united in the glad seriousness that sets musicians apart from their fellows. But I noticed, also, how old Holmes looked next to these men who, for all that they had suffered, were still young in years.

The piece they had chosen was a simple air from a popular opera. Easily it might have been saccharine. But there was something poignant in its vision of shelter coming _at last_ , of sleep as a respite from the too-keen knowledge of sorrow.

“Ah!” sang Carlton, “wake not yet from thy repose.” His tenor was sweet and pure of tone, Turner’s handling of the piano delicate. Holmes’ violin, meanwhile, yearned without confidence after the peace they promised.

“Softly the days go on, by sorrow all unharmed.” Did I imagine that Carlton paused, for the fraction of an instant, on the line’s conclusion? He gathered himself: “Thus may life be to thee a sweet existence charmed.”

None of us believed it, of course, not really; none of us could. But it was sweet to think that such promises might yet be made by an ardent lover; sweet to think that such dreams might yet be cherished. I was not the only one affected. Hurst, never the most demonstrative of men, held his wife’s hand, while Gladys and Margaret had moved to sit with their arms around each other. Even Rattisbon, usually so taciturn, appeared deeply moved. We made our habitual goodnights in near-silence.

It was long, that night, before I slept. I recalled a fragment of poetry Holmes had once quoted to me, written by a former tutor of his: “And I have asked to be / Where no storms come, / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, / And out of the swing of the sea.” Despite what should have been the soothing influence of music, I was uneasy. Increasingly I felt that perilous currents surrounded us, and that I navigated them as one without chart or compass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Holmes as a reader of Petrarch, see “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”; the line in question may be translated “You serve your values, and I am bound by mine.” Earl of Carston is one of the titles of the Dukes of Holdernesse; I presume that the seventh duke would by this time have succeeded his rather unpleasant father. 
> 
> The air Carlton sings is the famous (or once-famous) Berceuse from Jocelyn, performed here in a 1914 recording by John McCormack and Fritz Kreisler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuNe-2BlepQ
> 
> The lines of poetry Watson quotes are by Gerard Manley Hopkins, from a collection first published in 1918, but drawing on materials written earlier: http://www.bartleby.com/122/2.html. For the quotation, and for the idea that Holmes learned Greek from Hopkins, I am deeply indebted to the late Anthony Burgess; both feature in his Sherlockian story “Murder to Music.” The idea that Holmes, bohemian soul though he was, found a kindred spirit in Hopkins is one I find very plausible.


	13. Chapter 13

_Most of the cases have been sent home in company with congenital mental defectives, on account of being too slow and stupid to be of any value as soldiers, but further inquiry has shown that they may have been well educated and that they had been quite normal in civil life and during the first few months at the front. — Medical Diseases of the War, Dr. Arthur F. Hurst_

The next day, I descended early, and found Cushla Strotter alone over her breakfast tea, as I had hoped I might. I found her to be a valuable colleague, and recognized in her not only a kindred spirit, but something rarer still: another being with the self-appointed task of keeping a mind like a racing-engine from tearing itself to pieces, for love of the man whose it was.

“Good morning.” I found my voice hoarse with more than the morning’s disuse.

“Good morning, Dr. Watson. Arthur’s still abed.” She anticipated me.

“I cannot adequately express,” I began, “how sorry I am that this should have come upon you; not for anything would I have knowingly brought such danger to your husband — to us all — and to his work and ours.”

Cushla Strotter smiled at me, rather sadly. “The danger was already here, Dr. Watson.”

“Perhaps.” I salted my porridge, and attempted to shake my ill-humor. “But when I wrote to Holmes… such consequences I did not envision. And now he has positively advertised this disruption, and this danger, to the men on the wards! It was unconscionable, and I must apologize most profoundly on his behalf.” 

“You owe no apology,” said she; “but it is accepted.”

“Thank you. I shall of course explain to Hurst as well.”

“You may find him less perturbed than you expect,” said Cushla Strotter thoughtfully. “It may do the men some good… to be asked to observe, to explain, to take responsibility. It will be a novelty for them, to have such trust placed in their mental faculties.”

“Still,” I said. Not so lightly was I to be won from my conviction. “There is a not inconsiderable risk.”

“Of course.”

“And Holmes is not qualified to assess it, whatever his other abilities.”

Again Cushla Strotter smiled at me, and this time her dimple showed, advertising mischief. “That’s true,” said she, “but think of the exhilaration for so many of them, to be thus asked to aid one of their boyhood heroes! I think you do not always take into account the extent of your influence outside your profession.”

I huffed into my tea, but I was able to return her smile. “Would you have time to take an hour with Smith this afternoon?” I asked. If my attempt to shift our conversation to more neutral subjects was altogether transparent, she did me the grace not to show it. “I’d like to go into the town… an errand at the post office, and then there’s something about Turner that’s worrying me. A detail, I think.” This was, of course, a lie; but where Holmes is not concerned, I am not always as transparent as he assumes.

“Certainly,” she said easily. “Smith still doesn’t speak?”

“He has come so far as to form words,” I said; “but he still speaks disjointedly and in fear… though whether in fear of finding the limits of his own capacities, or in fear of what might come to interrupt him, I could not say.”

“Well,” said Cushla Strotter briskly, “I’ll see what I can do. I think it sometimes helps,” she added disarmingly, “being a woman. They confide in me, perhaps, as a sort of sister — or see in me something of the mother who bent over their cradle. We never quite lose our nursery selves, do we?”

“No,” I said, and I felt suddenly very old.

***

Going into Newton Abbot without Holmes’ knowledge that afternoon, I found that my heart pounded with the elated fear of a guilty schoolboy. I took with me my medical bag, though whether as pretense or precaution I could not myself have said. Careful in the defense of my lie to Mrs. Strotter, I went first to the post office. There I bought cards to send for Christmas, and learned that two of Mr. Bradford’s sons would — after all, at long last — be home by the new year. I gave, of course, my sincere and hearty good wishes to the man. I tried not to think of the two other sons who had died, the one who was missing, the one who lay in hospital. I tried not to imagine the elder Mr. Bradford’s nights.

I walked briskly to the tea shop in Queen Street. Having made my order, I took out my cards, and affected to occupy myself with them while I covertly observed the young woman whose shop it was. She was, to my mind, striking, though perhaps not conspicuously so. Above the average height, she moved with a quiet, clean-limbed grace. Her dark hair was drawn smoothly back into a glossy roll at the nape of her neck; her dark eyes were quiet. She worked efficiently within her domain, handling her delicate arts with a deft hand. And it was this self-possessed young creature who, according to Holmes, had dropped one of her lovely painted teacups when the activities of the soldiers were mentioned! 

The worst and most obvious conclusion was one I was loath to draw; I was glad that Holmes, too, appeared to have eliminated such a possibility from his calculations. And yet he had seemed to imply that my very familiarity with Sergeant Turner might have led me into overlooking something I should not… Well! it was precisely to resolve my doubts that I had come. Miss Hooper made her scones with apples and dried ginger, and they were of a quality to encourage conversation, if I could but think of a plausible avenue to pursue, once I had asked whether she used Quarrendens or Hangdowns.

The pleasant-faced women sitting next to me rose and departed, and Miss Hooper’s occupation clearing their crockery gave me my first opportunity. I cleared my throat, and hoped that my age might at least exonerate me in her eyes from being guilty of an all too common type of impertinence.

“If I may be permitted the observation,” said I, “these are most delightful, Miss Hooper. It’s a rare treat to partake of something that doesn’t taste chiefly of rationing.”

She smiled; she really was a charming creature. “The apples help,” said she easily. “I’m afraid it’s terribly difficult to get enough butter, even with the cows up at the farm. I wish the Government could be convinced that scones are essential to morale.”

“Indeed.” I refrained from observing that I knew at least one man, very near to the heart of that Government, who would entirely agree with her. “Do you get your apples from Seale Hayne?”

Her capable hands were momentarily stilled in their work. “Yes.”

“Capital. Forgive an old man’s curiosity,” I added, in what I hoped was a disarming fashion; “I merely wondered, as I cannot recall seeing you there, though my attachment to the hospital is now of some months’ duration.”

“Oh?” A short pause, then: “I have a standing order; one of the men brings them.” The hands resumed their labor. The tablecloth was efficiently scraped, the crockery gathered up and placed carefully behind the counter. “You’re a military doctor, then?” Miss Hooper asked her question only once she had placed time and distance between us. Holmes’ description of chintzes and teatime gossip had led me to expect a less formidable opponent, and I wondered whether the cause lay in his misjudgment or mine.

“I am.” I did not have to simulate a wry chuckle. “Have been, off and on, for more than your lifetime.”

“Off and on?” Her laughter, too, was unfeigned — and there, suddenly, was my unexpected opening in her defenses.

“Well! My health was… damaged, after Afghanistan, and I went into private practice. I wrote to my old regiment when this war broke out, and they were glad enough to have me.”

“Yes.” Her disconcertingly steady gaze was more intent than it had been before. “They would be.” A last flick of a gingham rag over the counter, and then she was entirely still again. “So you _know_ ,” said Miss Hooper, surprisingly. 

My instinctive answer — _Know? what?_ — would have been worse than useless. Holmes, of course, would have brazened the matter out shamelessly, or inferred what she meant from her tone, or her hands, or the gingham, or the scones, or…

“Yes,” said I, telling myself that, if she believed it already, it might well be the truth. “At least,” I temporized, “as much as any man in such circumstances may, perhaps.”

My sense of bewilderment was augmented when I beheld her eyes filling with tears. “It will be easier,” I said gently, “if you tell me everything at once.” I felt inexpressibly shabby, inveigling this innocent — for so I could not help but think of her — into confidences. But if I was to keep her safe from whatever dangers threatened Seale Hayne, and if I was to reassure Turner as to her safety, I had to know all, and I could not think how else to shape my enquiries.

Miss Hooper drew an unsteady breath. “I don’t think he was fully conscious of where he was going, the first time.” She had begun to plait her fingers together. “He climbed in through the kitchen window — I had left it open to cool a pie — I’m sorry, you don’t need to know that…. I couldn’t say which of us was more surprised when we discovered each other in the parlor here. Thank God I didn’t come up behind him!” she added, as if struck for the first time by the knowledge of some averted disaster. 

“I dropped the poker and put my arms around him. He was shaking.” She dropped her eyes. “Please don’t sermonize,” she said softly, “not unless you must, as his doctor; even then, I am not sure that I could bear it.”

I cleared my throat. “My dear Miss Hooper,” I said, and found my voice stopped. I swallowed. “My dear Miss Hooper, I cannot help but be impressed by your courage — even if it does seem to me to approach the foolhardy.” A small sob escaped her, but she did not turn away.

“I do know,” said I, very softly. “I do know. As one who was once… adrift, as your Sergeant Turner finds himself now, I cannot help but be glad and grateful that he has found you, and that he trusts and is trusted by you. As his doctor, I can give you hope, but must warn you against false confidence.”

“Must you, Dr. Watson?” Her voice and her hands trembled.

“It is very likely,” said I, brutally, “that he will never again be able to take up the work he did before the war. The noise, the pressure, the close work — I could not in conscience recommend it, nor can I indeed foresee that he would be capable of it.”

To my very great surprise, Miss Hooper smiled at me, with more tranquility than she had shown since the commencement of our exchange. “No,” said she simply. “But I thought he might do very well in a tea shop.”

I gaped slightly at her. Even as I gained enlightenment concerning the agitation and the activities of Sergeant Turner, I was increasingly at sea in the emotional currents of my conversation with this remarkable young woman. I felt the need of reestablishing a firm footing. “Miss Hooper,” I said, “forgive me, but I feel compelled, as a medical man, to inquire as to whether — that is, to make sure that he — to impress upon you the importance of suitable precautions when — ”

“Oh!” Miss Hooper flushed scarlet, and I felt the blood burning in my own cheeks. “Oh, Dr. Watson…” She rose, and busied herself unnecessarily with the tea tins behind her. I am not sure whether I remained silent chiefly out of consideration of her own embarrassment or my own. 

“Dr. Watson,” said Miss Hooper again, and I managed to meet her eyes. “I appreciate,” she said, with a voice that was still not quite steady, “that you speak out of kindness. And I am sure that I have shocked you.”

I coughed, unable to deny or, I feared, to conceal the fact. “As a doctor and a military man,” I began.

“I have, though,” said Miss Hooper, with a perspicacity and a directness that were alike disconcerting. “But, you see… we don’t.”

I sighed — not perceptibly, I hoped. I was not about to give this girl the kind of lecture on VD that I had given the enlisted men, but all the same, she ought to be better informed. I cursed most heartily and unjustly Miss Hooper’s elder sister for not existing. “Whatever you may have heard, Miss Hooper,” I said severely, “to neglect such matters is not safe. For any number of reasons.”

“Oh, Dr. Watson,” said Miss Hooper breathlessly, shutting her eyes, “please stop.” It was worse than I had feared. This mixture of prudery and recklessness could not be other than destructive. I understood, better than before, my friend’s passion for writing little monographs. In that moment, I felt that I could myself write a scathing one upon the miseducation of English maids and men, in this particular field at least.

“You misunderstand me,” said Miss Hooper. “We sleep.”

“What?”

“That’s all.” She appeared perilously close to tears. “Ronnie — Sergeant Turner — he doesn’t sleep well.” Her hands were gripping each other, though not, I thought, in anything as simple as entreaty. “You must know that. That’s why he comes. At night, I mean. He came on the night of the Armistice because it was all over; because it was all over at last, and he didn’t know what to do.” For a moment her face twisted like that of a child on the verge of weeping. Then she took a deep breath, and faced me squarely. “He sleeps,” she said. “He falls asleep with his arms around me, and I hold him if he wakes in the night.”

I stared at her. How young she was, I thought; how heartbreakingly young, and how incandescently brave. The clock marked out the seconds of our silence.

At last I cleared my throat, and bent to my medical bag. “I will ensure, if I may, that you are prepared for _all_ eventualities.” I placed the small envelope on the counter, without looking directly at her. “I cannot pretend,” I said, “to be entirely easy in my mind. But I shall not forbid this, er… this conduct unless I believe it to be in the interests of Sergeant Turner’s welfare and yours. And I promise not to sermonize.” 

She gave me a brilliant smile, its radiance augmented by that of unshed tears. “Thank you,” said Jane Hooper, and I left her shop with a haste not entirely befitting the dignity of my age and profession.

***

Having departed the tea rooms, I walked almost at random, my mind awhirl with what I had learned. If Turner had been with Miss Hooper on the night of Ashby’s death, there was at least a comparatively innocent explanation for the fact, so early remarked by Holmes, that he had been wearing his greatcoat when he met me in the quad. I was, however, dismayed to learn of such manifest and undreamt-of laxity in hospital discipline. Of course, it was part of Hurst’s design that Seale Hayne not be guarded like an asylum. But what else might not be going on among the men without his knowledge? 

Amid such gloomy speculations, I bent my steps towards the train station, to ask the observant porter about the Sikh whom I had seen waiting for his train with such preternatural patience. A glance at my watch told me that she would be soon occupied with seeing in the 5.15, but I hoped I might find the attendant bustle rather to my advantage than otherwise.

“Good afternoon, Miss Frost,” said I, pausing outside her sanctum. She put down the magazine she was reading.

“Afternoon? Oh, it’s you, Dr. Watson. Going up to London? Nothing wrong, I hope?”

“No, no,” I assured her quickly. “I was merely wondering if you could assist me.” For the second time that day I found myself prevaricating to a perfectly nice young woman. But Dorothy, pert and pleasant, the youngest daughter of a gardener, seemed unlikely to resent such a stratagem. “Er,” I said, “I am trying to return this to its rightful owner.” Thankful for the low light, I brandished a small package drawn somewhat haphazardly from my medical bag. “A Sikh visiting one of our men, I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch…”

“Ah, that’ll be Captain Virk,” said Dorothy easily, and I started. “I know him. But he hasn’t been down here since -- ooh -- just after the Armistice.”

“Ah,” said I, quite taken aback by this unexpected bounty. “No? Well. Then I suppose it cannot be so very urgent.” Unable to think of a plausible excuse for asking if he had been in Newton Abbot on the night of the Armistice itself, I scowled at the package I held in my hand, in vague hopes of lending artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

“Suppose not,” agreed Dorothy, and craned around me to see the signals. “I’d put it up in our lost luggage, but if it’s all the same to you, Doctor…”

“Oh, quite,” said I, incoherently; “I will keep it until he comes again. Good evening!”

“Evening, Doctor!” And with that cheery salutation, Dorothy returned her full attention to the position of trust in which the railways had placed her. I was glad enough to get away. I could think of at least three glaring gaps in the logic of the partial narrative I had presented to her. But perhaps matters would not appear to her in this light. My compunction at misleading her was alleviated, I confess, by my sense of triumph: the mysterious Sikh at last had a name and an identity. Still, I could hardly preen myself on a coup there, as his military history had been conjectured already. What more did knowing his name and rank gain for us?

On my walk back to the hospital, I tried to make sense of my newly acquired knowledge, to place the known facts into some kind of order in my own mind. Turner was clearly more active, and perhaps more cunning, than I had imagined. At the same time, he lacked Miss Hooper’s strangely clear-eyed recklessness. I was not myself sure whether I ought to attempt to encourage or restrain them. Despite my preoccupations, I made good time back to Seale Hayne, and was able to seek out Holmes, whom I found browsing the ledger in our library. I had rather the feeling of preparing to make a report. The winter light picked out the bones of my friend’s face. Without looking up from the volume he was examining, he spoke.

“Come in, my dear fellow,” said he. “I am perfectly prepared to hear what you have to say. We are quite alone.”

I might have chosen to be annoyed by his breezy confidence, but despite everything, I could not help but find reassurance in the way he was so easily master of his situation and his surroundings. 

“The Sikh,” I told Holmes without preamble, “is a Captain Virk.”

My friend’s eyebrows expressed the liveliest surprise. “Is he, indeed!”

“I have told Miss Frost a preposterous tarradiddle,” I confessed. 

“Hum!”

I told him all, and his amusement was barely suppressed. “But,” I concluded, rallying a little, “we can at least look him up now.”

“So we can,” said Holmes, musingly; “it is likely to be a tedious and protracted business, but if there is no other way… But tell me, Watson,” said he, “what has given rise to your more serious disquiet.”

When I had recounted all I had learned of Turner’s unorthodox if chaste entanglement with Miss Hooper, Holmes merely gazed at me, his grey eyes infinitely sad. “But my dear Watson,” said he, “you must see that this does not exonerate him.”

I sighed. “I know, Holmes,” said I, “that it gives us nothing certain. But it shows us how Turner might have found Ashby, returning to Seale Hayne at dawn.”

“Yes.” Holmes lit his ancient briar and puffed thoughtfully at it. “It does. And you like that young woman.”

“I do,” said I, somewhat defensively. “I was not myself sure whether she was willfully ignoring the potential difficulties that would lie in their way, or whether she refused, as a matter of principle, to view them as significant in comparison to that strange, passionate attachment…” I shook myself slightly.

“Good old Watson,” said Holmes around his pipestem. “Your romanticism is a fixed point in a changing age. But in all seriousness, my boy, I’m inclined to agree with you in thinking that her partisanship may be regarded as a point in his favor. Besides, there’s the fact of his seeking her out… that he was capable of it…” He went long enough without speaking that I thought he had lapsed into one of his long silences. But then: “It speaks well for your treatment, Watson,” added my friend.

I regarded him: languid, complacent, and brilliant as ever he had been. “I still have not forgiven you,” said I mulishly. I knew it was a concession as I said it; after our years together, he understood very well that by the time I found it necessary to warn him that he was not forgiven, he was very close indeed to being so.

Holmes sighed deeply, and I thought there was relief in it, as well as resignation. “I would have avoided it if I could.”

“Mm.” It was not quite a growl. He threw me his matchbox; I had not even been aware of reaching for the pocket where I kept my cigarette case.

“Damn you, Holmes,” said I without heat. “You do show off most shamefully sometimes.” He shrugged diffidently. When I had finished lighting my cigarette, I threw the matchbox at his head; naturally, he caught it in midair. These ritual skirmishes concluded, we smoked together in amicable silence until it was time to descend for dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, I draw a little further on the known histories of Newton Abbot. A Mr. Bradford did, in fact, have six sons serving in the war. I have not recovered their personal histories; their fates are based, I fear, solely on the average casualty statistics. Hooper was among the most common surnames in Devon for the period. Dorothy was the youngest of five (!) sisters, and would have been 23 in 1918... old enough to be trusted by the railway, young enough to be still decidedly young in the good Dr. Watson's eyes.


	14. Chapter 14

_Then, with a pistol in either hand, I addressed him. “One more step, Mr. Hands,” said I, “and I’ll blow your brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,” I added with a chuckle. — Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island_

The evening was a sombre one. Talk at dinner was stilted, though Holmes attempted courteously enough to engage Reynell in conversation, while I talked medical shop with Cushla Strotter, and discussed professional placements with Hurst. The winter would see fewer opportunities for the men to occupy themselves outdoors, and fond though I was of many of them, I believed thought might productively be given to their return to civilian life.

“I have written to the Earl of Carston,” said I, as matter-of-factly as I could manage. “He is in some sort acquainted with Holmes and myself, and Carlton’s a man whose hand with horses I could recommend in good conscience to the very highest circles.”

Holmes smiled across the table at me. “There is a great fraternity,” said he, “of horsey men, and Carlton is certainly worthy of distinction among its members.”

Hurst’s pallor was still noticeable, and he saved his words, but his gaze was lively and interested. “And Merrison?”

“He’s your patient, Hurst; you think we may dismiss him with confidence? He has certainly great influence with the men, and remarkable control over himself. But he is still rather a nervous case, is he not?”

“I do not deny it.” Hurst reached to refill his own wine glass, and I took from that gesture an index of his own lingering agitation. “Still, I think to remain here much longer might do him more harm than good. He has a great desire to be — ” here Hurst smiled bitterly — “normal. And he would do well enough in a sedentary occupation, perhaps where he could do some good for his former comrades.”

I glanced across at Holmes, but his gaze remained cool; clearly he would not volunteer his own governmental connections. “I might,” said I, a little hesitantly, “write to a schoolfriend at the Foreign Office. He would, I think, be sympathetic to a nervous case. And to a former soldier… both his sons were in the war.”

Hurst coughed. “You are a veritable placement agency, Dr. Watson,” said he, not unkindly.

“We all do what we can,” I replied; it seemed the only possible rejoinder. “How is Smith coming along, Mrs. Strotter?”

She was quick to perceive my desire to turn the conversation, and drew Reynell into a discussion of Smith’s silences, his stammering, his pathetically earnest desire to please. I participated, I fear, with only half my attention on our exchanges. I could not help but feel that unspoken truths threatened us all.

***

That night, I again found myself unable to sleep. After some hours of restlessness, I rose, and shrugged into my robe and slippers. I crossed to the window, and looked down into the quad in hopes that its moonlit stillness might calm me. But the cold, severe lines of the building and its shadow, the flags and the winter-hardened ground, were hardly soothing. Shivering I returned to my bedside. What could have drawn Ashby out into the night, into silence and the dark, to the encounter that would mean his death? The hands on my scarred watch told that it was just midnight. Knowing my friend’s nocturnal habits, I did not fear disturbing him.

Silently I made my way down the corridor. Curiously, I felt not like a trespasser, but like a householder making sure of his own. I feared not that my friend would be thwarted in his inquiry. But I did fear my own ignorance of what I could sense, but did not perceive; and I feared, too, Holmes’ own obscure calculations of what might be worthily risked in his pursuit of the truth behind poor Ashby’s death. What I had learned in Newton Abbot had rather agitated than allayed my fears. And then there was the matter of the attack upon Hurst, still obscure to me, however transparent it might have seemed to Holmes. I feared the aftereffects of the event upon the community of Seale Hayne; and I feared the dangers Holmes might be incurring by his open provocation of innocent and guilty alike.

After a moment’s pause outside it, I opened Holmes’ door. Dark and silence greeted me. The soft sound of the latch going home, however, was echoed by another: the cold, deadly _snick_ of a revolver being cocked.

“Holmes!” It was an anguished whisper, and it was idiotic. My hands had flown above my head before even that instinctive cry. What could it accomplish, but to identify myself to an enemy? I knew how seldom he carried a gun, a weighted riding crop being his weapon of choice, and assuredly more practical against nighttime assailants than a firearm. I took hold of myself; my mind was whirling wildly. “Holmes!” I whispered again, and ducked on the instant, moving forward in the quick, ape-like shuffle I had learned under fire.

“Cross over to the fireplace.” Those masterful tones were unmistakeable. Nearly gasping with relief, I obeyed, thanking heaven that my premonitions had driven me from my bed. If danger was close enough that my friend slept armed, my place was most assuredly at his side. As my own alarm subsided I heard, behind me, Holmes’ ragged breathing. When I had brought the fire into flickering life, I turned to regard him.

In facing him, I faced one of the great shocks of an eventful life. It was not chiefly that he held the revolver with both hands, and still the barrel shook; it was not that his pallor, even in the light of the fire, had a ghastly tinge to it. But his eyes were wild, and they held in them the certainty of death. It was a look I had seen too often to mistake it. The next instant, I saw the shock of recognition in his face; he knew me, and still he held the revolver stiffly in trembling hands. I strode to him, took the weapon, and lowered its hammer before restoring it to the bedside table.

“Chair,” I commanded sternly, and to my surprise, as much as to my relief, he rose, and stalked stiffly past me to take his seat by the fire. Wordlessly I pulled up the second chair. I could not think how to breach the silence.

“A thousand apologies, my dear Watson,” murmured Holmes. He did not meet my eye. “As you can see, I am somewhat…”

“Afraid of air guns?” My tone was sharper than I meant it to be, and my words crueler, but I had been badly frightened, and reminded of other fears.

He laughed softly, but it was not a laugh that put me at ease. “No, my boy, no. Nothing so conspicuous.”

“Then what? Not Turner, surely? Challoner could not… Holmes, for the love of heaven…”

“Calm yourself, Watson,” said my friend gently. “My data are as yet incomplete, but if I am right, I do not believe I have anything to fear from your patients.”

“I should be permitted to share your danger,” said I, rather hotly. “Surely here, of all places, I may be taken into your confidence concerning the peril that you face.”

“I am in no peril,” said Holmes, in a tone that belied his words. “The revolver is… a habit.”

“But Holmes,” I protested, “a habit from where? I have known you go unarmed into the foulest dens of London, into the alleys of Marseille and the teeming squares of Rome.” I knew him well enough to know he was not a nervous man, and I could not bring myself to demand of him an explanation of his own fear. Sherlock Holmes has never been a man to ignore a significant fact. “The fields of Sussex,” I ended lamely, “can surely offer no great hazards.”

It was some moments before Holmes spoke again, and when he did, it was with a bitter edge to his voice. “I regard it as a tribute to the beautiful selflessness of your own nature, Watson,” said he, “that you should imagine a man with an exceptional knowledge of soil types, a thorough command of German and Arabic, and a brother in the workings of government, to have spent these past years of war in bucolic retirement amid the rolling downs of Sussex.”

I closed my eyes. Of course. I had been a fool. Had I not already been seated, I think I should have fallen into the chair. “Holmes,” I began, and could manage no more.

“No, my dear fellow,” said he, “you must not blame yourself.” He had, as so often, divined my thought; this was cold comfort. 

“I should have guessed,” I said. “I should have guessed.” The evidence had been there before me, in my unanswered letters, in the infrequent telegrams, in the furniture of our Baker Street flat, in the trembling of his hands as he held his violin. I might never be able to recapture all the signs I had missed. This time, Holmes would not boast to me of them, of his ability to itemize the mundane indications of a profound devastation. I knew I must speak, if this silence were not to close over us. I cleared my throat painfully.

“The letters you sent, before… that is, in the first months of the war… I kept them.”

“You could not think, Watson, that I had forgotten you?”

“Not that.” I did not mention that he had kept a three years’ silence once before. The tension in all his lineaments told me that he expected me to; he was like a man braced for an inevitable blow, against which he could not ward himself. I swallowed. I found a childish resentment rising in me, less against Holmes than against the war itself, that had made use of us both without hesitation and without remorse. I felt, too, an inexpressible sadness. Again and again I had confronted the effects of this monstrous war. And yet something in me wished to rail against being forced to confront its effects on this man, on this mind, on this heart.

“During my first winter at the Front,” I said slowly, looking deliberately into the fire instead of at Holmes, “I came across an old copy of Punch. Already they were mocking the ‘war romances’ being published at home. It was a parody of my own style, sensationalist in the extreme.” I stole a glance at him, but there was no mirth in his face. “I — it was an absurd thing. You were incognito, hunting Moriarty, hunting out spies, raiding behind the German lines.” I chuckled reminiscently. “We sat and smoked in the midst of direst peril. I tore the story out of the magazine.”

That brought the palest of smiles to Holmes’ lips. “Vanity, vanity,” he chided softly. “You need not be so protective of our reputations, Watson.”

“It was not vanity,” said I. “I kept the thing folded up in the same pocket as your letters. You’ll think me a fool, no doubt, but I wore it like a talisman. Absurd as it was, I found some comfort in it. It presented a fantasy I could willingly believe in — that we were invincible, that we would survive. That you might suddenly drop down next to me, clad in a staff officer’s uniform.”

“Watson!” Holmes rose with a sudden movement, and crossed to the fireplace, standing with his long fingers braced against the mantel.

“I did not realize,” I began feebly, and stopped. I felt myself to be picking my way in a quagmire, where Holmes had long been standing while I, all-unknowing, had envied him his solid earth. “I do not know what I would have done,” I confessed frankly, “had I known you to be facing perils greater than my own.”

He turned at that, and dropped back into his armchair. “Not greater, Watson.”

“Did you…” I hardly knew how to frame my next question. “Did you get none of my letters, then?”

He passed a hand over his brow. “My brother kept them for me,” he said tonelessly. “The dangers of forwarding them were manifold and obvious. Mycroft did grant that the communiqués I was sent from London would include notice of your continued survival and well-being. I fancy he may have taken pleasure in the fact that the additional codes would confuse any interceptors.” 

My medical instincts were on the _qui vive_ , given the dangerous tensions under that dry narrative, and what Holmes said next disquieted me still further.

“I think,” remarked my friend, almost dreamily, “that he was afraid of the pirates.”

In the silence that followed, I listened to my own heartbeat. I reminded myself of the innumerable sane conversations Holmes and I had conducted during the past weeks, the undimmed luster of his brilliance. And yet, given my wide and ever-expanding experience of the ways that nervous disease might manifest itself, this was less comforting to me than it might have been. Holmes’ attitude in his chair was more relaxed than it had been; he had the air of one exhausted by a crisis — the most private man in England, with all his defenses down.

“Pirates, Holmes?” I ventured.

“Indeed.” My friend’s voice was almost slurring with weariness. “Knowledge of your safety was my chief and capital demand. I threatened him with all the resources of my power, and all the consequences of my future displeasure. But Mycroft is a man with his finger on the pulse of Empire. He was impervious. So I conjured him by the fears of the schoolroom: by the ghosts of Flint’s men, and by the tapping of Blind Pew’s cane; by the treachery of Israel Hands and the madness of Ben Gunn I conjured him.”

“A most powerful oath.” I was not quite master of my voice. I found myself deeply moved by the incongruous image of those two great intellects locked in combat, their stalemate broken by an appeal to childish alliance. And that because, with the world at war, and himself crossing continents in service of his country, Holmes demanded to know of my safety. Nothing I could say could be an adequate response.

“But, my dear Watson,” said Holmes, and there was a flicker of his customary alertness, “you came to me upon some matter of import, no doubt, from which I have unpardonably diverted you by my… discourteous welcome.”

I sighed deeply; it seemed an age since the mysteries of Seale Hayne had kept me from my rest. “It was nothing, Holmes.”

“Come, come, Doctor!”

“In the morning,” I said wearily. “Don’t ask me whether that’s a request or a medical order, because I don’t know. But it can wait till the morning.”

To my surprise, he smiled — a faint pull at the side of his mouth. “Very well,” said he. “Good night, Watson.”

Having risen, I stood irresolute. “Do you… want anything?” I asked at last. “Powders, or…?”

This smile was less faint, though the exhaustion had not lifted from his face. “No,” said my friend; “thank you, Watson. Sleep well, my dear fellow.”

I nodded. “And you, Holmes.” I managed the words through a tight throat; it was always harder for me than it was for him, to leave things unsaid. Yet I returned to my bed with at least this consolation: whatever lay before us yet, Holmes and I would encounter it together, as we had faced so many perils past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again amnesty must be begged: the Holmes brothers would have known the pirates of Defoe and Ballantyne, but not those of Stevenson. _Treasure Island_ was not published until 1883, so could not have provided the matter for the fraternal pact. But I had these particular pirates woven into this chapter, and this chapter into the arc of the whole piece, for a long time before publication, and discovered my error too late to easily change it. Feedback on whether or not the pirates should be revised to accurate ones is welcomed. (Does _Treasure Island_ still have recognition value, or was the author’s childhood anomalous in this respect?) The 1914 parody to which Dr. Watson alludes does exist: http://planetpeschel.com/2016/07/sherlock-wwi-parody-terrors/. Holmes’ knowledge of German is canonical (LAST); I infer his knowledge of Arabic from his interest in Chaldean (DEVI) and from the fact that he was enable to glean in Khartoum information useful to the Foreign Office during the Great Hiatus. Laurie R. King also suggests that Holmes is fluent in Arabic, though she does not put him in the Middle East until just after WWI.


	15. Chapter 15

__

_This is the kind of friend you are— / Without making me realize / My soul’s anguished history, / You slip into my house at night, And while I am sleeping, / You silently carry off / All my suffering and sordid past / In Your beautiful / Hands. — Hafiz_

I awoke the next morning from a sounder sleep than customary, to a vague sense of relief, and a pressing sense of sorrow, dimly known and deeply felt. The events of the previous night and day arranged themselves slowly in my drowsy consciousness. I swung my feet into my slippers, filled the basin and plunged my head into it. The icy shock brought me more fully awake, and after a brisk toweling — this was no morning to freeze — I crossed to the window, and drew back the curtains.

Clouds hung low in the sky like smoke, their substance visible against the lightening of the sky that was all we would see of dawn, this deep in winter. Frost rimed my window and the roofs of Seale Hayne. Further off lay the moors, dark as ash, their colors too subtle to be seen if looked at directly. Only out of the corner of my eye could I perceive the differences of brown and purple in the earth and its sleeping plants, and the occasional dark stone, more solid than the shadow it resembled.

I knew the wards to be already astir, and the day in the kitchens already well begun, but all I could hear was silence, save for the soughing of the wind. My imagination was unequal, I found, to picturing with what emotions the others would be facing this winter dawn: Hurst and the gallant Mrs. Strotter, facing their patients in the aftermath of most intimate danger; Holmes, preparing again his impregnable calm, a surface so untroubled that even I had not guessed at what lay beneath. Then there was Turner, Turner whose hands were steady, whose voice shook, who could love without hesitation after four years of war, four years of loss; Turner who might do very well in a tea shop. And there was, of course, among those washing and dressing and thinking longingly of the days before rationing, when tea and coffee and plentiful eggs were to be had, one other. Did he think of poor Ashby’s face, I wondered? Did other faces haunt him? The attempt on Hurst proved, horribly, that Ashby’s death had not been merely the product of a moment’s aberration, a slip of one man’s fragile sanity, at the cost of another’s too-fragile life. No, this was a deed whose perpetrator remained grimly resolved on self-protection.

I ate my breakfast in haste, nor did I have to feign preoccupation. I desired to arrange my thoughts and words before that morning’s meeting with Turner. When he arrived, earlier than usual, I was glad of the care I had taken; the poor boy stood stiff and shivering at my door, as if arraigned before a tribunal. 

I put down my pen. “Come in, Turner, and sit down. Close the door — and put a log on the fire if you like.”

He shook his head tightly, but the shadow of a smile appeared briefly on his face. 

“Well, Turner,” said I, when he had taken his seat, “we’ve proved beyond doubt that you can build card houses.” His smile trembled again. “This is not,” I continued, “meant as preparation for a career in the music halls.”

“Thank goodness for that.” His voice was not steady, but I was relieved that he could joke. 

“My friend Holmes,” said I gently, “is fond of praising the mathematical symmetries of card houses, pleasing to the logical mind. Hurst believes that the methodical creation of patterns can free up one’s subconscious. And I — well, I may be a rather unimaginative fellow, when all’s said and done, but I don’t know a better way of training your hands to be steady around small tasks, whether that’s handling playing cards or a cigarette case or small coin… or teacups.” His head jerked up at that.

I cleared my throat. “I have spoken to Miss Hooper.” His start was convulsive, involuntary; his hands gripped his knees till their knuckles went white — and then were deliberately relaxed. Very slowly, Turner reached out to the idle pack of cards on my desk, and began to build.

“Well?” he asked, when he had constructed the first level of the edifice. I could have wept.

“She is a remarkable young woman,” said I fervently, “most clearly worthy of your trust. And of your love.” Turner’s hands paused in their delicate work; his eyes were wide on mine. “I don’t know,” I said slowly, “what you want to tell Hurst.”

Turner dropped the nine of diamonds and the knave of spades. “What I want to — to — ” He stopped, and swallowed hard.

“As I see it,” said I, keeping my own voice even with an effort, “some sort of shop work might be eminently suitable for you: quiet, requiring perhaps attention to detail, but not too much conversation. And if you would wish to, well, to remain with Miss Hooper…”

Turner’s palm flattened the half-built card house. “If! If I wish it!”

I held up my own hands in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t flare out at me, Turner. I’m not leveling a charge of desertion; I am merely attempting to point out that I can hardly recommend you to Hurst for a position in a tea shop on the grounds that you have been, well…”

A slow, sly grin spread over Turner’s still-pale countenance. “Sleeping with its owner.”

I coughed. “Just so.”

“We do intend,” said Turner, and broke off. “That is,” he said, “if she’ll have me, I intend… That is… I don’t care what people say, if she doesn’t. God, I’ll make it my life’s work to be worthy of her. I don’t care what the chaps say about me working in a tea shop if she’ll — if we could — ”

“Yes,” I said, and felt absurdly like an indulgent uncle, rather than a medical advisor. I drew breath. “Then, if you’ll allow me to make the suggestion, Turner — ”

“Please!”

“If you’ll allow me to make the suggestion,” I repeated, a shade reprovingly, “I will suggest the placement to Hurst on some other grounds. You have delivered apples there, I think, and honey.”

Surprisingly, it was this that made Turner blush. “She comes here for the honey.”

“Quite. In any case, you are legitimately familiar with her business and with her.” His blush deepened, but I forged on. “I will suggest,” said I, “that, while remaining in residence here, you might take up a sort of apprenticeship in Miss Hooper’s tea shop. It cannot but be beneficial for you to be around people more often — civilians and strangers, as well as those of us here. I do not say that it will be without its challenges.”

Turner nodded, grave and sobered. I smiled at him. “We will, of course,” said I, “continue to have our meetings, if perhaps not so frequently. And you will have an excuse to, ah, strike up a courtship of Miss Hooper, ah, officially.”

Again came Turner’s smile, startling in its radiance. “I could take her flowers,” he said. “Up by the woods, there’ll be sorrel and betony, archangels and sweet woodruff. I could take her flowers.” 

For a moment I could not speak. “Very well, Turner,” I managed at last. “Capital idea. I’ll mention the plan to Hurst later today.” He rose, brought his heels together, and then suddenly, jerkily, reached his hand across the desk. I stood in my turn, and shook it warmly. When he had gone, I took some moments to compose myself. I was still standing at the window when there came a knock on the door.

“Come.” By the time I had turned, Rattisbon was in the room, braced against the door behind him.”

“Dr. Watson.”

“Rattisbon — is something wrong? Is Dr. Hurst not — ?”

“I have just come from our appointment; he seems perfectly well.” Rattisbon’s tones were clipped, terse, but little more than usual. Still I frowned at him; there were deep waters here.

“Yet you are concerned for him? Or have a concern you are unwilling to raise with him?” The second, less welcome possibility had flashed into my mind on the instant; I wished I could dismiss it as quickly.

“Dr. Watson,” said Victor Rattisbon, “I have a confession to make, and I wish to make it before witnesses. Will you accompany me?”

I rose. I could feel the blood drain from my face, but I straightened my shoulders, and nodded. “Certainly, Rattisbon.” I was pleased to hear that my own voice still sounded calm, even. “I follow you.”

I was unsurprised to find that he made for the library, though my heart sank at the realization that, beyond a doubt, it was Holmes to whom Rattisbon wished to confess, and not to Hurst, his physician and — or so I had imagined — his confidant. I looked around in desperation for aid, but both Mrs. Strotter and Reynell would be with their own patients at this hour.

Rattisbon quickened his pace as we went, and I was almost trotting in the tall soldier’s wake as we entered the library.

“Mr. Holmes,” said Rattisbon, his voice ringing, and my friend’s head jerked up from the book he had been perusing. When he spoke, however, it was calmly, without moving from his armchair.

“Speak,” said Holmes; “I am bound to hear.”

“I must confess,” said Rattisbon, “to a guilt that I cannot feel, and a crime that I do not regret.” He was staring very fixedly at a point just over my friend’s left shoulder. I was frankly appalled, but a glance from Holmes commanded my silence as clearly as any words. 

“No man’s blood,” continued Rattisbon, “is on my hands. That is — ” he laughed bitterly, and the hairs on my nape prickled at the sound — “I have been guilty of no man’s death since the war.” Holmes held the young soldier’s gaze steadily.

“I thought,” said Rattisbon roughly, and I watched his chest heave as he fought for breath to complete the sentence, “I thought, Mr. Holmes, or dared to hope, that you might understand.”

Still Holmes had not moved, and now he smiled slowly up at the angry young giant towering over him. “Good man,” drawled my friend. He waved a hand. “Sit down, Rattisbon.”

With an abruptness that told me his knees had gone weak, he did. I followed his example without waiting to be told. Rattisbon ran a hand over his mouth, as if to release the tension in his jaw. The only sound in the room was his breathing, and the faint pops and hissing of the fire. 

“On the night of the Armistice,” began Rattisbon without preamble, “he came to me.” My jaw slackened with astonishment; fortunately I was sitting behind him. “By trains and buses and lorries he came, and I walked to meet him through the fog, and by a miracle we met each other on the road unseen.” Rattisbon looked away from Holmes, into the fire. “He said that he came for need of me.” It was almost a whisper. “And that was the miracle beyond imagining. I have been avoiding him, you see.” 

Again he snapped around to face Holmes — as if in confronting him, he were confronting something within himself. “When I was last at the post office,” said Rattisbon, “they told me you had been inquiring after him. Not that they knew that I — that we — ” He broke off with a shrug. “It was just gossip. The mysterious stranger…”

“I had been inquiring,” corrected Holmes softly. “It was he whom I found.”

Rattisbon nodded tightly. “My absence,” said he, “rendered poor Ashby more vulnerable. It must have done. When I returned, he was gone from his bed. But he was not…” Again Rattisbon stopped himself short. “I would have _seen_ him,” he protested, as if in response to a challenge. “I would have seen him, or I would have heard him if he cried out, if he had been fleeing an assailant, and I saw and heard nothing.” His voice held the ring of desperation — and, I thought, that of truth as well.

Holmes hummed thoughtfully. “You returned about what time?”

“About three.”

At this my friend sat straighter in his chair. “At three? In those temperatures?” I failed to draw the inference, but Rattisbon flushed darkly. “Ah,” said Holmes, “of course, you work with the cattle, don’t you? The byre, then?” He held up a forestalling hand as Rattisbon drew breath. “It matters,” said he, “because it places you a good distance from the house, too far for hearing or sight or violence, with a witness to bear you out.”

Rattisbon’s flush grew darker still. “I won’t have him involved in this.”

“Nonsense,” said Holmes crisply; “there is the corner of a telegram form protruding from your sleeve; it is he who has finally emboldened you — perhaps adjured you — to take this step, when you have resisted such a confidence for so long.”

As so many clients had been before him, Rattisbon was momentarily silenced. He bowed his head in wordless acquiescence. “His name is Arminder Virk,” said he softly; “he is very beautiful, and very kind. We met in a field hospital, before this.” He gestured at his face, still without meeting Holmes’ eyes. “I thought — I thought it was a kind of madness, at first, and then the most glorious sanity. Our companies were thrown together, as there weren’t enough men for the line. I called it luck; he called it providence.

“We would eat our dusty bread with Tickler’s marmalade, and he would tell me of the mango tree in the garden of his childhood home. It grew just by the fence, at the bottom of the hill. He and his brothers would run home from school to eat the ripe fruit in its season, till their lips were swollen with surfeit.” Rattisbon licked his own lips, and I had a suddenly vivid picture of the storyteller and his enraptured audience, exchanging whispered sensualities in the strange, shifting half-light of the trenches. 

“When this happened — ” again a demonstrative gesture indicating the drawn skin, the missing eye — “I didn’t write to him. After all that, nothing. I couldn’t make myself believe that I… that I would have his permission to, that he would accept a letter with my handwriting on it, that he would read it without shame or surprise. He wrote to me: ‘I was distressed beyond measure to hear that you had been wounded. But God will have pity.’” Rattisbon flashed a wry grin. “It’s a superb irony, of course, that he’s religious. But somehow,” said Rattisbon, and there was awe in his voice, “he seems willing to stick to me. And I can’t… I can’t even imagine a future for myself.”

Holmes was silent for several moments before speaking, and when he did, it was not in his own words. “ _Love makes of each moment an eternity, / And tends the garden of the heart’s desire._ ” Rattisbon stared at him. “ _Those who plead in the defense of love,_ ” continued Holmes, “ _in love’s judgement shall find grace._ There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace,” said my friend, “and as much knowledge of the world.”

Rattisbon nodded abruptly, and then put a hand over his eyes. For some moments the three of us sat in silence. “You will not tell Hurst?” Still Rattisbon did not look up.

“I see no reason to do so,” said Holmes, “and indeed several weighty arguments against such a course of action. My friend Watson here will tell you that I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.”

Rattisbon looked up, and only looked his gratitude. I shall not soon forget the expression on his scarred face, suddenly, startlingly open.

“The good doctor will no doubt be glad to advise you on possible futures,” said my friend gently, “but for the time being, fresh air might do you some good, I think. Watson is the medical expert, but even I know it does not do to brood too long over a problem in confined solitude.”

“ _Cura te ipsum,_ ” I muttered, but was visited with guilt when I saw the smile struck from Holmes’ face.

Obediently Rattisbon left, and he left alone; he did not have to say aloud that he desired no company, that he wished to be alone with the relief that must necessarily attend upon such a confession. Silence grew around us in the aftermath of his departure.

“I do apologize, Watson.”

“What?” The words would have ben surprising enough, even had they arisen in the course of a conversation, rather than spontaneously.

“I know,” said Holmes gently, “that it is a very great risk: the stirring up of these men’s senses, and of their fears. I know they have been too much abused through both. I saw — and see — no other way of getting at the truth than through the creation of ripples like the one that has just washed up on our shore in the confession of that very courageous young man. But I risked a peace not my own.” Holmes cleared his throat. “I arrogated to myself, perhaps, an authority which was not mine. I still do most firmly believe that I have acted for the best, and that I could not have acted otherwise. Nonetheless, Watson, I am sorry; and I apologize.”

I all but gaped at him. I was accustomed to receiving his apologies in Mendelssohn and Schubert and ordered files and suppers at Simpson’s. “Of course, Holmes,” I managed at last. I thought, in his dangerously unbending mood, and with the euphoria of a resolved enigma enveloping us, that I might risk something more. “Now, about this business of your involving yourself in life-threatening intelligence work…”

To my profound relief, he laughed, if a little wildly. “Tickets for Elijah at the Old Vic,” he cried, “and dinner at Marcini’s beforehand.”

“Done,” I said, but I could not sustain a pretense at matching his gaiety. “Oh, my dear Holmes…”

My friend held up an imperious hand. “Watson,” said he, “old friend, we are getting into deep waters. Pray, sit with me a while. There will be time enough, I trust, for you to upbraid me for past faults, but I must think of the future now — and I would fain have you by my side while I do it.”

I smiled. “Holmes,” said I, “could you think I would desire to be anywhere else?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Virk’s letters, see: http://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2017/08/first-world-war-indian-soldiers-letters-in-connecting-stories-exhibition.html; David Omissi, ed., _Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-18_. See also http://www.1914sikhs.org/
> 
> Elijah was given at the Old Vic on February 1, 1919: https://books.google.com/books?id=KMFnAgAAQBAJ. Mendelssohn was, of course, one of Watson’s favorites; I think the emotional and spiritual grandeur of the work would have appealed to Holmes, and I am presuming that he would know — by unofficial if not official channels — about the performance this far in advance.


	16. Chapter 16

_Undoubtedly, however, nature regards the damage to the enemy as of more importance to the bee community as a whole than the loss of one or a dozen of its members.  
— R.E. Snodgrass, The Anatomy of the Honey Bee (1910)_

We sat together for a long time. The luncheon hour came, and passed. The shadows changed. The men who came into the library sought out their books and wrote their letters in peace, apparently undisturbed by our presence. I had time to wonder how much I myself might be responsible for this, establishing Sherlock Holmes’ silences as part of the texture of a well-ordered world.

At last I cleared my throat. The years of our familiarity and the events of our recent past emboldened me to do so. “Holmes,” said I, “it is nearly teatime. You should take something.”

Very slowly his eyes came to focus on me; very slowly he smiled. “Yes,” said my friend. But he remained motionless in his chair, his long hands idle, his limbs relaxed and yet every part of that prodigious intellect clearly on the alert. 

I decided to attempt to stir him from his brooding reverie. “Why,” I asked, “did you ask about Rattisbon’s conduct in the film?”

“What?” For a moment Holmes looked at me unseeing, his grey eyes distant. “Oh, yes: it was the way he treated the other man’s body. Horatio with Hamlet — it was the same desperation, the same tenderness.”

“Good heavens, Holmes.”

“You may well say so,” said my friend imperturbably. “I had no way of knowing, of course, what bearing it might have on the case.”

“Of course,” I repeated mechanically.

“I need,” said Holmes, and inhaled sharply, “I need to talk to Merrison. And Challoner, if possible. As long as we do not know to a certainty when the smoke bomb — oh yes, Watson, that is what it was — was placed in Hurst’s fireplace, we must know as much as possible of what these men noticed, what they saw and heard.”

I nodded, and swallowed before speaking. It was unthinkable not to trust him. “Challoner you may be fairly sure of finding in the Great Hall. He is not yet well enough for much activity, but he is a fine whist player, as some of the others have learned to their cost.”

“Excellent!” Holmes clapped his hands together and rose; I was at a loss to know why it should have been this information that spurred him to action, but I followed in his wake. 

“Merrison,” I said, “will be in the fields; I will find someone to fetch him — or go myself, if you like.”

Holmes nodded, his jaw set. “The latter would be preferable, I think, Watson; useless to touch off idle speculation.”

“Certainly.” But as I turned to go, he stopped me. His lean hand was urgent on my worn sleeve. For a moment, time seemed to crystallize around us: nurses’ carts rattled; in the quadrangle, men talked and laughed; a fly buzzed against a windowpane.

“Before you go,” said my friend, “tell me again, Watson, what happened on the night of the Armistice.”

A chill raised the hair on my arms. “I have told you, Holmes, already.”

“Yes.” He was implacable. “Tell me again; take me back to that gathering.”

I inhaled. “We sat in silence. I do not think Merrison and Reynell played their usual game of chess — no, wait, they did; Reynell lost a bishop on an early play. Rattisbon made a joke about pawns, I think… not in very good taste, but one could hardly blame the fellow. He sat at the writing desk. Turner could not play. But he began to sing — or, no, that was Carlton.”

“And Ashby?”

“Yes, he joined in the singing. And he broke the silence; I think I told you. Poor Ashby. He was haunted by fear, I think, more than most of them. The memories are one thing, but Ashby was unmoored.” I looked down at my shoes. “And he wanted to be a writer.”

Holmes gripped my sound shoulder with his other hand. “And that, my dear Watson,” said he, “is a thing of infinite value — one pearl of great price, for which a merchant might go and sell all he had — a victory of which any doctor might be justly proud.”

I could not speak, but I met his eyes, and nodded my thanks. And I left him, and crossed the quadrangle, and set out across the low slopes of the farm to gather in one of his witnesses.

When I arrived at the barn, Merrison was conducting something with a strong family resemblance to a kit inspection. Scythes and rakes, halters and harness were presented to him by men smiling, men solemn, men at ease, men visibly trembling, and he praised each one. It seemed that the lieutenant had devised something of military ritual to soothe with its familiarity, even as the new patients settled into the routines of peace. In the shadow of the doorway, I smiled to myself, seeing it. And yet an ominous little verse floated into my head: _The toad beneath the harrow knows / Exactly where each tooth-point goes…_ I cleared my throat.

“Dismissed!” said Merrison, and grinned, to show that such commands were pleasantries, now. One man laughed too loudly. 

“Sorry to disturb you, Merrison.”

“Not at all, Doctor! We were just putting up shop.” He was jovial, and yet — Hurst was right — highly-strung; there was a tautness under that calm exterior. 

“Mr. Holmes,” I said, “was desirous of speaking to you.”

“Oh?” He was mildly surprised, no more, already moving easily into step beside me.

“About this business — this business of the accident with Dr. Hurst.” At the last moment, I reflected that Holmes might not want the men to know that it was anything else. “If you observed anything out of the ordinary…”

“Quite so.” Merrison frowned slightly. “I hardly know.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said; “honesty is all he wants. And he has a way of helping people recall trivialities they believe forgotten, or unobserved — at least, he always has with me.”

“So,” said Merrison, with amusement in his voice, “I have always been led to believe.”

I coughed modestly. “Indeed. Hurst and I,” I continued, “were discussing possibilities for your placement yesterday.”

He glanced sharply at me. “Oh?”

“Indeed… You’d be a loss to us all, of course, and sorely missed by the men; but we mustn’t be selfish.”

“Hm!” He was silent for a few moments, and then observed: “It seems strange, to think of a life after the war. Of our lives, after the war.”

“Yes,” I agreed; “yes, it does.”

I delivered him to Holmes with an easy farewell, and an uneasy mind.

***

That night, Holmes played Tchaikovsky. It is a thing to wring any man’s heart, that solo line of the concerto, defiant in its hope, ardent in its tenderness. And the old Stradivarius seemed to me, that night, to speak from a vanished and a gentler world. Holmes’ violin sang of hopeless love, and of unfathomable truth, and I retired to my bed uncomforted.

Scarcely, it seemed, had I extinguished the candle at my bedside when the door, almost soundlessly, opened. I sat bolt upright. Whoever sought me must have waited in the hall for the vanishing of the wavering bar of light.

“Watson,” said Holmes quietly, “I need your help.”

I exhaled; exasperation warred with relief. “You might choose a more conventional hour or place. But of course I am at your disposal, Holmes.”

There was no warmth in his grey eyes, no lightening in his expression. “Yes… you are very good, Watson.” He paced the length of the hearthrug in tight, unhappy circles, and then sat down, not in the straight-backed chair by the fire, but on the edge of the bed. “I have solved the case.”

“Good heavens, Holmes!” Our solitude was immaculate; we needed to fear no eavesdropper; and yet fear struck cold to my heart in that moment. “But then,” I inquired, “how can I be of use to you? If you have your solution, I am sure that your proofs are worthy ones. Or is this one of the cases where your instincts are one way, and the known facts are the other?”

Holmes shook his head. “No, my boy. The dilemma we face is more serious than that.” To my surprise, and to my infinite distress, I perceived that he was close to tears. “What object is served by a circle of misery and violence and fear? What condign punishment could we possibly devise…” Holmes broke off. I wished dearly in that moment that we were back in our own rooms in Baker Street, with the tantalus ready to hand. To be in a place of safety and comfort, when so much was uncertain in the world… it was an impossibility, and a consummation devoutly to be wished. I reached for his hand, and pressed it.

“My dear Watson.” Holmes withdrew his hand, pressed his steepled fingertips against his lips in his customary gesture. “What I have to say will wound you.”

I felt my mouth go dry. “You are very sure, then.”

“Yes.” Holmes was silent for a moment and then: “Oh yes,” said he. The repetition was so unlike him that I felt my spirits sink still further.

“Tell me,” I begged, “that it was not Reynell.” I could not feel that making the plea was unworthy of me.

Holmes looked sharply at me. “No; no, it was not Reynell. You’ve a sharp eye for human nature, Watson — he’s a ruthless man, in his way, and clearly affected by the events — but no; his fear has been for and not of his patients. He lacked opportunity, and still more signally did he lack motive. You were Ashby’s doctor; Reynell could not have learned or betrayed any damning confidence.”

I nodded, and breathed a little more easily.

“Turner, of course,” continued Holmes, “we have exonerated, and Rattisbon. Who would have thought that their affaires de coeur would prove so consequential in this case?” His smile was brief and unconsoled. “I confess that, based on your letter — and on his initial churlishness — I entertained some fleeting suspicions of Hurst… but beyond the fact that his solicitude for the men is unmistakably genuine, he is a man who habitually lies, and yet who has always told me the truth. A most unusual phenomenon, you will agree.”

He fell silent for some moments, staring into the fire. Its light picked out shadows on his face, deeply worn with time and care. “Let me tell you a story, Watson,” said Holmes softly. “Let me place the facts before you as I see them. Then, old friend, tell me — ” his voice checked briefly — “tell me what you make of them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The author apologizes for the cliffhanger, which came of expanding a chapter so much it had to become two. The good news is, there should be only two more chapters until the end.
> 
> For the Tchaikovsky, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSUBRMFmDhg (antique violin); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwmxYYAM-g0 (Stradivarius); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTE08SS8fNk (Itzhak Perlman). The “hopeless love” is imagined as the second violin solo from Swan Lake; the “unfathomable truth” as BWV 1004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KaYzgofHjc
> 
> Kit inspection: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E_Company_Liverpool_Scottish_HU_57197.jpg
> 
> Dr. Watson's "ominous little verse" is Kipling satirizing bad imperial administration, because of course it is: http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_pagett.htm


	17. Chapter 17

_But the past is just the same—and War's a bloody game..._  
  _Have you forgotten yet?..._  
  _Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget._  
_—Siegfried Sassoon, “Aftermath,” 1919_

“Imagine to yourself,” said my friend, “a man and a soldier. He may have enlisted; he may have been called up. That will only matter, I think, if it comes to a jury trying to acquit him.” I glanced sharply over at that _if_ , but Holmes held up a forestalling hand. “Let us say he enlisted. In any case… willingly and more than willingly he trained, and fought, and persevered in a war that was a nightmare, because he believed that its cause was right. Mark you that, Watson: he believed in the cause of the war itself, and not merely in his duty to it.”

“You relieve my mind,” I muttered; “I half-feared you had kept me from my bed to retell my own history to me.”

“No, my dear fellow.” Holmes rose again, and crossed to the hearth. He held out his hands to the banked flames, but made no move to stir them up into life again. Regarding him, I found myself moved with pity. At my behest he had come here, to confront the dilemma which now brought him to this unhappy perplexity. Many were the perils and the sorrows we had confronted together in the past. If Holmes had not always been successful, yet he had heard many strange secrets without turning away his sympathies from those who uttered them; he had brought peace to many troubled souls, who had despaired of finding peace in this world, or justice at other hands than those of the Almighty.

I cleared my throat. “Holmes,” I said, “my dear friend, you must know that I trust you implicitly.” He gave a sigh; almost I might have called it a groan. I persevered. “You know that I have been willing,” said I, “to act with you to extend the arm of justice beyond the reach of the law. We have dealt, you and I, with men become a law unto themselves, and we have snatched men and women back from the brink of despair, which I count as a greater victory even than saving them from ruin. My dear Holmes, even if poor Ashby’s killer proves to be practically unassailable…” I broke off, but concluded: “I do still believe, Holmes, that any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”

“Thank you, Watson.” Still my old friend stood motionless, with his back turned to me. “But I come to you for your considered opinion as a doctor and a soldier. Hear me out, if you would, without allowing your generous sympathy for me to influence your judgment of the situation. I have told you before,” said he, with bitterness in his voice, “how inimical to clear reasoning are the emotional faculties.”

“You have,” said I briskly, “and if you had not, Sherlock Holmes, I would reproach you now with coming very near to being morbid.”

He turned at that, and smiled, albeit fleetingly. “Good old Watson,” said he. “The reproach is a just one; I submit to it. This soldier of whom I speak — he survived, but he did not fight this war to its end. Prevented from doing so by the wounds to his mind and to his body, he persevered nevertheless in good heart, believing, God help him, in the justice of the cause; believing that in the harvesting of potatoes and the heartening of his fellows, he, too, was fighting in a critical moment for the freedom of mankind…. Then came the betrayal.”

“What betrayal, Holmes?” I dared not raise my voice above a whisper.

“Why,” said Holmes, “the end of the War. They capitulated, those brave generals who told their men to fight over ground rendered barren and bloody; they hammered out a punitive peace among them. And the future — insofar as it is not a future defined by armaments and reparations — has been left to take care of itself. Survivors not wanted.”

I swallowed. I could not deny the justice of such a vision — to a point. And it was a vision that, in its towering simplicity, might well drive a man to the brink of madness. I rubbed at my ancient scar tissue. “And, Holmes?”

Again my friend sighed. “And,” said he, “I believe this man to have seen in Ashby’s gladness, in Ashby’s transparent relief, in Ashby’s desire for a life after the war nothing less than a betrayal. I believe that he thought himself called upon to stand in place of a court martial, the court martial that would never be summoned to pass judgment upon the treasonous act of hope.”

I rose, and crossed to stand next to Holmes on the hearthrug. “I wish I could think it fanciful,” said he softly, “but I can find no other explanation that will fit the facts. I have discovered here no hot passions of desire or of resentment; no small grudges brooded over; no wrongs that a man could have imagined himself as righting through Ashby’s death. No: Ashby must have been the cause of his own demise, and what could that inoffensive boy have done to deserve such an end in the mind of one of his fellows? No, Watson, I can see no other solution.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Tell me, old friend: how would you bring light into this darkness?”

Less stoical than Holmes, I bent to stir up the fire. If we were to hold a midnight conference, at least we needed not freeze while we were about it. I feared that my friend’s health could ill afford that self-negligence that had been so long habitual with him. “I see, Holmes,” said I, “that I have led you into deeper waters than I knew. We face not only the responsibility of reassuring the community, but that of protecting the perpetrator himself. Surely he cannot be held responsible for his actions.”

“ _Vox populi_ ,” said Holmes, “ _vox Dei_.”

“This man,” I said slowly, — still not naming him, for I was holding back my mind from certainty — “this man, Holmes… would it be possible to release him, to see him transferred, before informing the men? We could perhaps say that there had been an accident, with Ashby, after all; that Hurst’s chimney needs repairing…”

“Another lie,” murmured Holmes.

“If the only alternative,” I replied warmly, “is to destroy the foundations of their trust even in their comrades here…!”

Again Holmes took me by the shoulder and gripped me warmly. “You are right, Watson,” said he; “of course you are right.” He smiled, yet even in the firelight his face appeared unusually pale. “You must be right,” muttered Holmes again.

“It will be a great relief to my mind,” said I, “to have the whole sorry business cleared up at last. I do not expect miracles, Holmes; but I did not want poor Ashby’s death to be treated as a thing negligible, unremarkable… after so much death.”

“After so much death,” agreed Holmes. “And you and Hurst, between you… you could find a sanctuary for this man? Hurst would not be unwilling, surely, if you presented the solution to him?” 

“Not unwilling.” In vain I struggled to repress a great yawn. “Not unwilling, though he will of course be grieved.”

Holmes scrubbed his long-fingered hands over his face. “It is no reproach to his regimen here. I will tell him as much. But there is nothing more we can do tonight, I think; I shall keep you no longer from your well-deserved slumbers. Good night, Watson.” 

“Good night, Holmes.” I took his words as a dismissal, and returned to bed; but on the threshold my friend paused.

“Watson?” I looked up, and met his eyes. “Thank you.”

***

I made sure that I was first down to breakfast the next morning. “Mrs. Strotter,” said I without preamble, “I must ask a favor of you.”

“Good morning to you, Dr. Watson!” she returned cheerfully. “You can ask anything, of course — though if it’s proper tea you’re wanting, it’s past praying for!”

“You are very good,” said I, “and I beg your pardon for my lack of courtesy.” She waved aside the apology. “But I wished to speak to you,” I continued, “before the others arrived, to ask if you would be able to take my patients this morning.”

“If you like.” Her dark eyes were wide and fixed on mine. “I can see the men on the wards at any time. But I think you would not ask if there were not something rather grave behind the question.”

I nodded my assent, and drank off the weak tea that was all our rations could afford us. “Holmes has done it,” I said; “he has ferreted out the truth. Even I do not know the whole of it as yet, but he has asked that I be present when he tells Dr. Hurst of his results.”

“In your quality as a dual specialist?”

“I suppose you might put it like that,” said I, and then Reynell came in, and our conversation turned into purely professional channels.

Hurst, with his characteristic mixture of austerity and impatience, received us at 10 o’clock, after his appointment with Rattisbon. 

“Mr. Holmes?” Hurst lit a cigarette before continuing. “What do you have to say to me? I am to see Challoner in half an hour’s time.”

Holmes brought the heel of his hand down sharply against the arm of his chair. “Dr. Hurst! I beg that you will acquiesce in interrupting — if only this once — your ministrations to the living for the sake of one of your dead… and indeed for the sake of your future endeavors here. Watson will tell you that I do not exaggerate.” 

Hurst nodded gravely. “Very well.”

“You have spoken,” said Holmes, quite coolly and evenly, “of finding a placement for Lieutenant Merrison.”

“Yes. He’s a good man. He’ll do well.”

“He’s a good man,” said Holmes, “who is guilty of cold-blooded murder.”

Hurst sat up in his chair, so abruptly that the ash from his cigarette fell unregarded to the carpet. Concisely and with a remarkable calmness, Holmes laid out for him the outlines of the case as he had presented them to me the previous night.

“I defer, of course,” said Holmes, astonishing me, “to your knowledge of the man’s case.”

“I cannot gainsay the logic of it,” said Hurst. “Worse, it is entirely consistent with what I know of his convictions and of his conduct.” He looked up, and there was pure misery in his gaze. “The very best of his conduct, indeed, can be explained by this sense of obligation to his comrades. He has more than earned their loyalty and their love. I confess that I never imagined — I never imagined this pathological dimension to his fervor, not even…”

“Not even after the attempt on your own life?” murmured Holmes, and Hurst’s silence was answer enough. 

I cleared my throat, deeming that my own interposition between these two intellects might be timely. “Holmes has suggested,” said I, “that Merrison might be moved to another hospital before the men are told. For they will have to be told.” 

“Yes,” said Hurst, like a man in a daze; “yes. But for God’s sake, Watson, why poor Ashby?”

I swallowed. “Because of our success with him,” I answered. “To the best of my recollection, it was he who broke our silence on Armistice Day — the silence that allowed Merrison to believe we all shared his convictions.”

Hurst ran a hand through his hair. “Yes,” said he, “I suppose that he did. Of course, since Merrison is ill, he must be sent elsewhere — I can write to a colleague — ” Abruptly he broke off. “Do you think us terribly lax, Mr. Holmes?”

My friend’s eyebrows shot up. “Lax?”

“That such a thing could have happened…”

“Surely,” said Holmes — and it was the first time, in all my months there, that Hurst had been interrupted in my hearing — “surely you did not suppose, Dr. Hurst, that you could cure all the ills of the war? Surely you did not suppose that the cataclysm of our age would be without its violent aftershocks?”

“You are not a doctor, Holmes,” said I, more sharply than I had meant to do. The three of us were silent together for several minutes.

“Thank you,” said Hurst at last. “I am glad to know that a man trained to evaluate the causality of disaster finds reason to hold us exonerated.” I glanced quickly across at my friend, but he did not visibly flinch. “Forgive me,” added Hurst. “I am grateful, that you have been able to — to illuminate what was dark to us. Even if it is for the sake of knowing alone. And of course Merrison will be safer elsewhere. Damn,” said Hurst suddenly, and covered his eyes with one hand.

“It is a miserable business,” said Holmes, “Old, unhappy, far-off things… and sorrows that, alas, may become all too familiar to us in the days to come. And yet. We must learn to live with these new truths. What ruins must we face,” he continued musingly, as if to himself, “and what edifices can we yet build?”

It was not a question to which I had an answer; but I knew that I could not allow despair to threaten these men, each of whom had given so much to the search for truth, and to the betterment of their fellow-men. “For a start,” said I, “Sergeant Turner is doing very well with his card-houses.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Attentive readers may note that Watson and Holmes' conversation draws heavily on the canon for its way of framing their shared and evolving understandings of exactly what the work they do is, and why they do it. YELL is the source of the remark about "any truth..." and that about bringing peace to troubled souls. 
> 
> The "backs to the wall" line is taken from Haig's infamous order of April 1918, which Vera Brittain recalls as being welcomed with such relief and gratitude by those on the front at the time: http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/backstothewall.htm
> 
> Holmes quotes Wordsworth at the conclusion of the chapter (despite Watson's assessment in STUD, he sometimes displays surprising knowledge of poetry, and I rather think that several decades of living with Watson might have rubbed off on him in this regard.)


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this is a week early, but I've missed a week here and there, and it seemed a shame to keep the epilogue on ice. Happy reading, faithful readers!

_We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing._  
    _We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever._  
_War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,_  
    _Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;_  
_Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall;_  
_And if these poor limbs die, safest of all._  
_—Rupert Brooke, 1914, “Safety”_

__

__

I offered, of course, to take Hurst’s message to the post office myself, but Holmes forestalled me, saying that I would be needed at Seale Hayne. We left Hurst’s office together, and I accompanied him as far as the drive.

“Don’t fret, Watson,” said he kindly, and strode briskly off. But I still gazed after him, until I heard a woman’s voice call for him:

“Mr. Holmes!” Margaret McPherson was running, her skirts gathered up around her calves. I could not hear what she said when she came up to him, but he smiled, and they walked off together, matched stride for stride. Before they were quite out of sight, she linked her arm companionably through his, and I turned from my vigil with a sigh of relief.

While the men were at luncheon, we held a conference, solemn as a council of war.

“I agree,” said Cushla Strotter, “that the men cannot all be told. It would be cruel; so many of them have looked up to Merrison, and have been helped by him. Those who knew Ashby, though, and cared for him… Surely even this dreadful thing would be easier to bear than the belief that it was a senseless accident?”

“For Rattisbon,” I said, “certainly. And I think for Turner, poor fellow.”

“I defer.” Reynell was solemn, but his face had lost some of the strain that had become habitual to him, and his sister’s smile was for us both.

“And Merrison,” said Mrs. Strotter. “Arthur?”

Hurst cleared his throat; he was still very pale. “I will tell him, of course, that he will not be punished, and that he will not face the law, on Ashby’s account or on mine. But he must — he must come to terms with his war.” He shook his head. “It is a blow,” he said softly; “it is a blow, to know that we could not help him. That I could not help him.” Cushla Strotter reached for his hand.

“This bloody war,” said Reynell, and none of us found reason to urge moderation of his adjective.

Little remains to tell. The response to Hurst’s telegram came swiftly, and we arranged Merrison’s trains; Reynell agreed to accompany him. On the morning that Carlton drove them to the station, several dozen of the men lined up to cheer Merrison’s departure, their salutes and their singing his final send-off. Standing next to Holmes, mere yards from where Ashby’s body had lain, I could not feel that it was an injustice. Rather, it seemed to me a remarkable expression of faith in a gentler future, in the future that Ashby had dared to envision for himself.

That night, Holmes and Turner played for us the Mendelssohn sonata. The almost unbearable melancholy of its opening line soon gave way to graceful conversation between the two instruments, cheerful and reflective by turns. I gave myself over to it, to the pleasure of seeing the company once again at ease with each other. Gladys Reynell held Margaret’s hand in her lap; Cushla Strotter sat with her ankle twined round her husband’s. Even Rattisbon, half-drowsing on the settee, seemed at peace. I saw the unmistakeable outline of a much-folded letter in his pocket, and wondered whether I would have the chance to meet the mysterious Captain Virk, or whether Rattisbon would leave us for the promises of a new life. Turner’s square hands, steady and assured on the keys, wove beauty around us all. And Holmes — Holmes stood straight, centered in himself. His sharp eyes were veiled, his restless intelligence surrendered entirely to the music, to the Mendelssohn I had once told him I loved, and which now he played from memory.

***

On Holmes’ last morning, we stood together, he and I, on the platform at Newton Abbot, and I fought down a lump in my throat. The company had made their farewells, with expressions of gratitude, promises of letters. Carlton had driven us both to the station. Our ride had been nearly silent, save for Carlton’s own chat, and he had departed again for Seale Hayne at my request; I knew I would not want company in the aftermath of Holmes’ departure.

Now, with his carpetbag at his feet, Holmes stood incongruously burdened with one of Meek’s baskets, itself containing a jar of Turner’s honey, and a pot that Gladys Reynell had pressed on him. I held the Stradivarius, trying not to grip the handle of its ancient case too tightly.

“What will you do?” I asked. My voice sounded hoarse in my own ears.

My friend smiled. “I shall go to Sussex, Watson,” said he. “I shall ignore all governmental communications, even or especially if they come from my brother, and I shall devote myself at last to the keeping of bees. The house stands ready.”

“Good,” I said; “good.”

“And whither,” asked Holmes, “will you bend your steps, Doctor, when Hurst has concluded his projects here?” My jaw must have dropped. “It is no great feat of reasoning,” said Holmes, “to hypothesize as much, when a man leaves new patients to another, while devoting his attentions to a case requiring a different specialty. He has set an example here; he has made his point.”

“Yes,” I stammered, “yes, he has said something of it. But we will be here through the summer, I think. Many of the cases are not to be wound up easily.”

“Quite so. And you will remain till the end.”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” echoed Holmes. “And then?”

“I don’t know, Holmes.” I spoke with some asperity, exasperated by his sangfroid and his certainty. “You reason it out — what is a twice-retired army doctor to do? There’s more work to be done, in the wake of this war, than could be completed in a hundred lifetimes. And I,” I said firmly, determined to remind him of the fact, “am an old man.” I sighed. _Where the devil was the train?_

“I don’t know, Holmes,” said I again, more softly. “But I will send you word.”

“You could do better than that; you could come to me.”

“What?”

“Come to me in Sussex.” I knew him well enough to know that his nonchalance was feigned; I thought I knew what it concealed.

“Holmes, it is very good of you. It is… it is more than generous. But what would I do there?” I bit back sharper words: _I do not want your charity, and whatever I do, I must make it my own._ I could not bear to risk the peace between us, when so little was certain in the world. Holmes made no answer to the question.

“I might,” said I, affecting cheerfulness, “become an independent consulting doctor. I could do worse.”

“Far worse,” agreed Holmes, but his tone was sombre. 

“Holmes,” I said, “be easy. I shall be well. And I shall come to visit.”

“But not to stay.”

I took a deep breath. “My dear Holmes,” I said, “I have no intention of living uselessly under your feet. Ours has been a partnership that has enriched me immeasurably. I would not trade upon it — or upon you — now.” I swallowed. “I know my role,” I continued, “and I have always known that it is a humble one. To reflect your light, and to write your romances… these have been my privilege and my joy. I have been proud to call you friend; do not make of me a mere hanger-on.”

“Watson!” My friend’s face was pale, his distress unmistakable. 

“I am sorry if I spoke hastily,” I began.

“No!” Holmes’ hand grasped my arm, the gesture arresting as his word. “No. My dear Watson…” For a moment he was silent, and I beheld the rare spectacle of Sherlock Holmes at a loss for words. “My dear Watson,” said he again, “you have long been the companion of my life.”

I stared at him, the man I know best in the world, the man who will always be a mystery to me.

“Watson,” said Holmes again, “never doubt that ours has been a true partnership, and an invaluable one. My dear Watson…” Holmes broke off, his voice rough, his grey eyes fixed on the horizon. “Do you remember the Hotel Dulong?”

“My dear Holmes…” I began, but he interrupted me.

“That,” said he, “was a crisis, yet an isolated incident; I cite it as an illustration merely. Think, Watson, of the man you knew when you first moved into Baker Street: of the aridity of his habits, of his pride, of his carelessness of his own person.” I swallowed a reply; I had reproached him for that carelessness often enough. 

“What would have become of your friend, do you think, had you not forced him to think about war, and invited him to talk about Tchaikovsky? What would have happened, had you not taught me to have faith in something other than facts? In offering to you,” said Holmes, “I ask for myself. If you come, come freely: to write romances, or to consult with patients, or to… to discover a hidden talent for gardening. Or,” he continued, in a changed voice, “set up for yourself in London, if you prefer, and let me hear from you; and know that there will always be a chair for you at my hearth.”

For several moments I could not speak. “Holmes,” I managed, albeit unsteadily, and found myself again silenced by emotion. But that one word had been enough; a smile irradiated my friend’s face.

“You will come, then.”

I nodded; I could do no more. His hand on my arm anchored me to the earth. “I will come,” I said at last; “I will come.”

I found myself caught swiftly in my friend’s embrace — basket, carpetbag, and violin around us — and then the train puffed noisily up to the platform, waved in by Miss Frost, and we were swept into the mundanities of leave-taking. The amiable Dorothy spoke merrily, even chaffing Holmes about the number of objects he found himself encumbered with. Holmes laughed with her, and I marked the wrinkles that appeared as he did so. I thought how fortunate I had been to know him since the days when Baker Street was an unfashionable thoroughfare, and both of us young men, almost without connections in the world, without links to other souls. I thought how fortunate I had been to have my life bound up with his.

Holmes put his hand through the train window to me, and I gripped it warmly. We had no need of words. The world had changed around us; worlds we had known were gone. And we survived them. True it may be that safety is not to be found in this life. Yet I felt then — and it is a creed I shall hold, I trust, till the end — that we are in the power of no calamity, as long as we have a hand to clasp in the darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turner and Holmes play the Mendelssohn violin sonata quoted in the Bert Coules radio adaptations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEQsjAVtZYY.
> 
> Watson alludes obliquely to Thomas Browne's _Religio Medici_.
> 
> Holmes and Watson don't give themselves enough credit for what they bring to the relationship, obviously... but it's at the core of my belief about them that they're at the core of each other's lives and hearts. So it felt right to end the fic with this _credo_ of sorts. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
